Missing Links
by SCWLC
Summary: He's lost, they're separated, lots of people are confused and the Doctor's about to clear up several mysteries of Gallifreyan history.
1. Waking

Item the first: **BRIT-PICKER/BETA WANTED FOR THIS FIC!** So, I'm Canadian, which means I don't have the best grasp of UK dialects, colloquialisms, sentence construction, word choice, etc. etc. etc. Second, while I enjoy the fanfics, I am not such a solid devotee of the DW universe that I know canon chapter and verse. While this is not canon, see Author's Notes for those details, I expect there'll be a few things in here that may conflict directly with the show in ways other than I intended. Basically, I'm looking for someone to read the rest of this fic and give me some feedback on a) "No one here would say this, we'd say X instead", b) "In episode X of New Who or Classic Who, this is contradicted in a serious way." c) "I have no idea what you just said here, I think you're making no sense at all. You need to clarify in-story." And obviously any super-glaring grammatical or spelling errors. Why am I advertising up here? Have you looked at the beta advertising here? There's just no way to narrow it down to a rational number of people. So I'm looking for volunteers.

* * *

><p>Title: Missing Links<p>

Author: SCWLC

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Summary: He's lost, they're separated, lots of people are confused and the Doctor's about to clear up several mysteries of Gallifreyan history.

Author's Notes: So, this is a Ten/Rose 'shipper fic. It is working on the premise that everything happened in the series right up until the moment Jackie is about to tell them she's got a house ghost. Basically, as if Doomsday and everything after never happened. Totally AU from there on. I have included information we found out in later episodes, but only things that had already happened to the Doctor in his personal past timeline, effectively. I wouldn't call this a fixit, because I'm just pretending something didn't happen, not actually fixing it.

Author's Notes 2: This was inspired by two fics, fadewithfury's 'Bring Down the Sky' and Saavik13's 'Linger'. The first for the lost colony concept and the second for the bonding and purring bits. Just so you know.

Okay then, here goes!

* * *

><p>The first thing he saw as he woke was that he was clearly in some sort of hospital-type room. His first thought upon noting this was that he didn't like hospitals. This led to the disquieting sense that he didn't quite know why – rather, he knew why, horrid places with cat nuns and flaps of skin and all sorts of mad people not necessarily helping anyone and the dullest of dull aesthetics. He noted the industrially white concrete walls, the industrially grey lower part of the wall that was probably supposed to be evocative of wall panels but was really just more paint, and the anaemic watercolour sitting just a little to the lower left of a television bolted into the upper right corner of the wall facing him.<p>

No, what he didn't know was when and how he'd come to that initial conclusion such that it was reflexive to think that way. He didn't know why he associated cats and nuns with a hospital. He didn't know what a flap of skin had to do with anything and why, other than the obvious . . . ickiness, such a thing would be offensive.

Thinking a little further, he realised he couldn't recall any of the reasons he was reacting to any of the things he was reacting to. He couldn't recall when he'd learnt any of the concepts rocketing about inside his mind, he couldn't, now that he thought of it, recall his name.

With that sudden and disturbing realisation he bolted to his feet from his bed, absently and easily disconnecting himself from the various machines, needles, drips, sticky bits and wires that were attached to him and began rifling through the contents of the room in a desperate search for anything that would explain who he was and what he was doing there.

There was nothing there. No clothing other than the vaguely humiliating backless hospital gown, no get well cards, personal items, books, balloons or bananas.

A delicate telepathic tap, the equivalent to clearing one's throat, ticked into his head. He turned to see a wide-eyed young woman staring at him, a man in a green lab coat behind her. Something in his mind told him that there was something about the green lab coat that was simultaneously wrong and right.

"Erm . . . hello," he said.

They both frowned at him, then the man said, very slowly and in another language he was sure was _very_ oddly accented, "Can you understand me?"

A surge of emotion washed through him. He frowned internally at it. The words, the language rather, it made him feel . . . nostalgic? Happy? Less lonely? That prompted another internal examination. Had he been lonely before? He couldn't recall feeling lonely, but then he couldn't recall much. All those thoughts whipped through his mind at a million miles an hour, and what were these measurements that he was thinking in that were so familiar as though he always used them, yet felt strangely false as though they weren't what he'd learnt as a child?

"Yes," he replied hesitantly. "I can. I'm sorry, I must not be used to speaking this language anymore."

The pair glanced at each other. "Not used to speaking this language?" the young woman asked, slowly approaching him. "Listen, I'm your nurse, can you sit down? I need to check your vital signs. You know, your breathing, blood pressure, your hearts."

"Alright," he said. Something about this was . . . right and wrong. But he didn't know what and couldn't put a finger on it because . . .

"So, can you tell me your name?" asked the man. "I'm Dr. Davienteral. I've been treating you since you were found unconscious on the Academy grounds."

"Ah. Well . . . that's a bit of a problem," he said, shaking his head. There was an odd buzzing at the back of it. Something comforting and nice and warm and he liked it and it wasn't supposed to be there . . . but it was? There were a lot of things going on right then that felt, paradoxically, as though they were both supposed to be there and not supposed to be there simultaneously. "I can't tell you my name. I can't remember it. I can't remember much of anything, actually."

The nurse had a cuff around his arm, pumping it up and resting a stethoscope against his pulse, taking down his numbers, which looked about right from where he was reading the numbers upside-down. She squeaked as he craned his neck about to look, but shoved a thermometer into his ear, taking his temperature. Interesting that she was using the . . . what system of measurement? Something in his mind told him it was archaic, dating back to before people used absolutes for all calculations, but whose people?

The doctor's eyes widened a moment. "Oh dear," he said. "I'd best get in a specialist, then. Someone who can do a proper scan to see if this is psychological as well as physical."

"As well as physical?" he asked the other man.

The nurse spoke up. "When you were brought in you'd suffered a heavy blow to the head. The scans showed a great deal of trauma all across your brain, but until you woke we couldn't entirely tell how bad the damage was, precisely. Your temporal lobe seems to be fully functional, but damage was recorded across . . . well . . . everything. Breathe in," she added, her stethoscope on the one lung. He obliged. "And out."

Wrong and not-wrong and it was two things at once. They weren't supposed to know about the temporal lobe, but they did, and if they did know they should have been able to better diagnose than they were. She checked the other lung and then asked him to engage his respiratory bypass. He obliged, nothing loathe as he was about to start hyperventilating from the overstimulation of all the wrong and not-wrong paradoxes, the wrong and not-wrong buzz in his head, the confusion of his amnesia and the fact that he'd just taken in that the industrial walls under the paint looked . . . oddly shaped. As though the cinderblocks under the paint weren't supposed to be the squares they were.

"Nurse Gemmatardural-"

"Call me Gemma," she said to The Nameless Patient. He rather liked that. Very dramatic, that.

The doctor - and why was he amused every time he thought that about Dr. Davienteral – shot her a look. "Nurse, would you mind fetching Dr. Toranamopandar?"

"Yes, doctor," she said, and left. There it was again. Why was that funny?

"Why don't you lie back down?" Dr. Davienteral said kindly. He hadn't even noticed when he'd sat back down. "Is there something you'd like us to call you? At least until we figure out who you are?"

The name leapt to his mouth as though it were his name, as though he always used it. Perhaps it was his name. "John Smith."

That too, felt wrong and not-wrong.

The doctor shot him a strange look, as though he'd asked to be called He-who-widdles-on-the-carpet. "Perhaps something a little less . . . terse?" he offered. "Jonerylandesmith?"

"Fine," he said. At this point he'd let them call him what they wanted, because he was quite rattled.

When the doctor finished looking him over, pronouncing him generally fit to leave but for the amnesia and consequent confusion, he left, leaving the newly christened (another term that was sitting oddly in his head) Jonerylandesmith to his own devices. He turned on the television and found himself watching a soap. But the language was the one the doctor and nurse had been speaking. The one that felt like it was right to speak it, but wrong for it to be spoken at all.

Watching the families on the screen, he felt an odd twinge in his head that he knew someone who would enjoy this dreadful show just as much as she enjoyed _Eastenders_. He didn't know what any of that meant. He turned the station over to the news and watched something about a political scandal involving a misuse of someone's telepathy to access another person's temporal lobes to get a look at their own timeline. Well, that was deeply invasive, to dip into someone's mind like that, not to mention Not Done to look at one's own timeline except in certain rather dire circumstances.

He flipped to another station. It was the weather. Seemed like a pleasant day out, although he was having to tick over in his mind from absolutes to the more contextual measurements being used. Wrong and not-wrong. He hastily went to the next station. _Televangelist_, his mind supplied. But the word wasn't in the language they were speaking, it was in the other language that kept on cropping up in his wrong, not-wrong thoughts.

"Time herself needs you to send in money so that we may continue to offer our services," the woman was saying. "We read the Timelines to offer you the greater Truths of the Way."

"Pythians," he muttered, unsure of why he felt such scorn.

"Not religious, are you?" asked a new voice. He turned to see a woman with dark hair, a kind smile, oddly large nose and ears, and something in his mind twinged at that too.

He blinked. "No." Then he paused. "At least, I don't think so, but it's a little hard to tell when you can't recall your name or House or the President or who knocked you on the head or why hospital gowns are always silly and humiliating no matter the planet you land on, and why hospitals always have those terrible paintings like that one, except on Raxacoricofallapatorius where they seem to think that orange slug clowns are relaxing."

She cut him off before he could continue talking, although she looked a little befuddled by the end of the sentence. "You're definitely a talker. I'm Dr. Toranamopandar. I'm the psychological analyst. Before I begin, I need you to give me your permission to do a surface scan of your mind. Check for damage. I promise to go no deeper."

Wrong and not-wrong. Common decency among telepathic species was that you asked for permission for the deeper scans for trouble, but those scans were too useful to be ignored as a tool in diagnosis. He knew instinctively that he was comfortable with both her expertise and the request. And yet it felt as though she ought not to be . . . capable of it? He nodded. "Of course."

She smiled. "And as I say to everyone, I know it sounds like I'm talking down, but I _am_ legally obliged to remind you to place anything you don't want me to see behind a door."

Suddenly not trusting himself to speak, he relaxed his barriers and felt her mind gently skim the surface of his. It felt . . . good. So good he was tempted to snuggle into her, which he sternly told himself was such awful manners he had to watch it. Her eyes widened, and for a moment she pressed a little deeper. Not so far as to be a violation, but a little further as one does when finding an important train of thought or memory to follow.

She swallowed sharply as she disengaged, clearly forcing a smile, then said, "Well, it looks as though the worst of this is physical damage, but there's . . ." she trailed off a moment. "I'll be honest with you, there _is_ something, but I'm very uncertain and I need to speak with a few colleagues on the matter. I don't want to give you the wrong information before I've finished looking into what I've found."

"I see," he said. "Anything at all you _can_ say?"

"Your mind is quite . . . well-developed," she said. "There aren't many places someone can get that kind of training. I'll let the Guard know so that they can narrow their search down. In the meantime, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a bit."

She was out the door before he could say anything, leaving him with the daytime telly.


	2. What's Needful

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: Yes, yes I did quote _Sound of Music_. Personally, I think the Doctor would be a fan. At least Ten would. Also, these are sort of divided along PoV lines. That is, chapters are mostly limited to one person's perspective, and they're going to kind of vary in length. Unless I get a beta/brit-picker who helps me even those out. Also, this is it for Torana's PoV pretty much.

* * *

><p>Toranamopandar barely kept herself together until she reached the washroom, staggering into a stall and vomiting. What she'd found in that poor man's mind!<p>

Oh, there was a massive gap in his memory, mostly caused by the trauma, and it certainly looked as though once the trauma resolved the right trigger would bring back everything else, but that wasn't the horror she felt. His mind was just . . . deprived.

A normally raised child bonded with his or her mother in the womb, bonding with the father upon birth, unless the father was particularly skilled in telepathy to connect with the developing mind of a foetus. He had no such bonds. And not in the way an orphaned child might, but as though someone had gone to extensive lengths to deprive him of such a thing. It had left a pained and empty pockmark in his mind. One that was exacerbated by the fact that there were no bonds there. Not of family, friends, lovers . . . nothing. Worse, there was an echo that spoke to some sort of vile telepathic deprivation.

Everyone knew that sort of thing was damaging! That was as bad if not worse than shunning. She'd felt his aborted desire to link with her, and the part of her that was a mother wanted to offer him that comfort, but she couldn't, because the moment she did she'd no longer be able to treat him. And whatever had happened was a crime on so many levels she was still bringing up everything she'd eaten in the last week.

"Torana?" came Berythimiara's voice. "Are you alright?"

She shakily stood and flushed, then came out to see her best friend. He'd gone into surgery, not psychology, but they were still close. "No, 'Thimia. I need to call the Guard, and then," she took a deep breath. "Then I need to put together a treatment plan for a very damaged new patient of mine."

"Damaged?" 'Thimia asked.

She shook her head. "I can't. Confidentiality, and this . . . this is so awful that . . . I just can't."

"Then I'll let you get to it," her friend said, "But let me know if there's anything you need."

A short call later and she was ensconced in her office with the guardsmen who'd come. "So, you have some word about the man they found at the Academy?" he asked.

She closed her eyes a moment, searching for strength. "I need you to understand that what I've learned was in confidence, and that I'm only breaking that confidentiality out of fear that he's not the only one who's suffered like this, and because someone needs to be taken to prison."

The pair exchanged glances, then the blonde woman pulled out her tablet computer and set herself up to take notes. "Then begin."

"First of all, I'm sure you're aware of the damage that shunning causes," she said. "More, the dangers of telepathic deprivation?"

"Of course," Guardswoman Polykithenia said. "It's used from time to time to ensure compliance in prison inmates."

"But in limited form," Guardsman Erdantimiret said with a reproving look at her. "He's showing signs of that?"

Toranamopandar sighed. "He's showing signs of a prolonged deprivation of literally years."

The pair's eyes widened and they hissed in unison. "Years?" gasped the woman.

"Oh, it's worse than that," she told them grimly. "It looks to me as though he's the victim of some sick experiment in childrearing, because he has no bonds. And I don't just mean shattered bonds as though someone murdered his parents, I mean as though he were created in vitro, and everyone involved in raising him was ordered to avoid offering him even the lightest of friendly bonds. He was about ready to enter a sibling bond with me just from my skimming his surface thoughts for clinical purposes."

The two guards looked as sick as she'd felt. "No bonds _at all_?" Guardsman Erdantimiret asked. "_And_ deprivation? That's torture, and illegal in every region . . . everywhere!"

"Exactly," she told them. "As soon as I've finished up my initial file and report I'll courier it to you so that you can begin an investigation. Someone needs to go to prison for this."

The guardsman shook his head. "But if he's a loomed baby that means we have even fewer things to go on in some ways, given the current state of genetic mod science."

"Well, all I can say is that I'll offer up his genetic samples for your people if they get warrants to search the records of the people doing the research."

A few more questions, and then she said, "Until he begins to remember, I frankly see no point in your questioning him. So, perhaps when you've finished looking through his effects and return them you can give him the complete picture?"

The two nodded seriously, and left. Toranamopandar pressed her fingers to her temples, wishing she could reach out to her bondmate right then. But she was at work, and moreover, he was a teacher. He couldn't be told the details of . . . what was the name their patient had taken for the time being? Jonerylandesmith. And the intake doctor had noted that his first impulse was the disturbingly terse, Jonsmith. Upon brushing his mind she was unsure that the 'erylande' part of the name was accurate, but it was a little late now.

As with anyone, part of a parent's naming was the feelings they received from the bond with their child. The terseness of his name spoke to someone named without reference to his inner being. Indeed, it was quite traditional for some to choose a new name upon adulthood if they felt that their birth name no longer conveyed who they were. But a name like Jonsmith . . . by Time Herself, had no one cared about this man?

But this brought her to the next issue. He needed help. No one could exist without bonds and contact as he had without becoming utterly unstable. That he was as stable as he was, well, it was a miracle. But it could only last so long, and the edges of his mind had been so clearly fraying without some sort of bonding to hold him together. And the need he'd felt . . . she reached for the wall communicator. She knew just the person they both needed. Her, in terms of Jonerylandesmith's continuing treatment, and him, in terms of what he needed as a person.

A few tones, and her mentor's kind face appeared on the screen. "Torana! This is unexpected. What can I do for you?"

For a moment she crumpled. "Oh, Marit, my new patient, he's . . . it's awful."

"It must be if you're breaking confidentiality," Maritejanisavindar said. "I'm retired, you know."

She shook her head. "You misunderstand, Marit. I don't need . . . well, I'd love a consult, but I'm not asking for that. I need someone to . . . to offer a parent bond to an adult male who's been bond-deprived his whole life."

The woman stared. "You'd better start at the beginning, Torana," she said.

"That's just it," Toranamopandar said, throwing her hands in the air in exasperation. "There is no beginning. He's got near total amnesia, his handling of . . . of normal speech is impeded! He's got a brilliant mind, I could tell that from the lightest of touches, but by Time, Marit, he's so desperate for a bond of any sort that he'd bond with the first psychopath who offered him a kindly touch. It was a purely clinical scan and he almost bonded to me!"

Maritejanisavindar gaped. "That . . . who could do that?"

"I don't know," she told the older woman. "But it's clear that he's been that way since . . . well, since before birth."

"He's a loom baby?"

Toranamopandar shrugged. "I can't think of any other way someone could manage to reach this stage in life without even the most basic of parent-child bonds." Then she looked the other in the eye. "I need someone to bond with him who has an idea of what a healthy mind needs to look like in the end. Someone who will be able to offer him a stable bond, but can work with me to treat his problems. He's fully functional, you'd never know it to just look at him, but scratch the surface and he's on the edge enough to run roughshod over everyone around him in a search for meaning and to ease the strain."

Her mentor and friend grinned, then told her, "Alright, Torana. You've talked me into it. I'll be there in a few hours, me and the Professor."

"Marit-"

"He's my bondmate, Torana. You really expect me to take this patient of yours on, bond with him as my newly adopted adult son and leave my bondmate out of it?"

With a chuckle, Toranamopandar said, "You make a very good point, it would be silly to think otherwise."

* * *

><p>Odd how a proper name, Jonerylandesmith, sounded less right than the too-short John Smith, and that sounded not at all right.<p>

His psychotherapist returned finally, this time with an older couple in tow. "Jonerylandesmith-"

"Call me John, please," he interrupted. "Really, that's too much of a mouthful and we both know that's patently not my name. I'm too fantastic for something so prosaic." He paused. "Fantastic? No. That doesn't sound right at all. Maybe sort of right? A little right? No. Just not right any longer. I wonder-"

She cut him off with the air of doing so before he talked them all into a healing coma in self defense. "Alright, John," she said. "This is Maritejanisavindar, who was my mentor through the Academy, and her bondmate, the Professor."

"Professor who?" he asked. Something about the question struck him as funny. Like calling people Doctor. Like a joke you can't recall the punch line to. Something else about the name brought to mind something to do with playing cards. Aces and sevens. It was gone too fast. And what playing cards? They weren't local, he knew that. Something alien.

He was distracted from the train of thought by them giving him odd looks. "Just the Professor," said the distinguished man next to the kindly-looking lady. He was going grey and her hair was pure white, but they exuded a gentle sort of comfort.

"Ah," he said. "Sorry. It just . . . almost reminded me of something." At Dr. Toranamopandar's look, he added, "Nothing I can put my finger on, unfortunately."

"Right," she said. "Well . . . John. I suppose I need to let you know what I found, and the treatment we're going to have to recommend for you."

"What would that be?" he asked, cautiously.

Her look was deeply sympathetic. "John, I don't know if you even realise there's anything wrong as you've been abused your whole life like this, but . . . when children are born, even a loomed child, they bond with their parents, their siblings, cousins. They create lighter bonds with close friends, teachers, mentors," she nodded at Maritejanisavindar. "With lovers to become bondmates as Maritejanisavindar and the Professor are. You, John, have never had a single bond in your life. I honestly don't know how you've managed to maintain your equanimity, your sanity even, but that small brush I had of your mind . . ."

She trailed off. It took everything in him not to back away and run. Backed into a corner, wanting to push past her and run, something in him whispered that he was destruction and the darkness that comes with the storm, and she was no obstacle. "What?" he grated out.

It was as though the temperature had dropped several degrees and she looked suddenly scared. _She should_, whispered Ka Faraq Gatri, destroyer of Skaro and Gall—

His mind flinched away from what he'd almost done, the memories that had momentarily surged forward slipped away like catching a moonbeam in his hand. And the woman, Maritejanisavindar, she acted. Because suddenly he felt a warm and gentle mind press against his own. He scrambled away from it. You didn't do that. It was rude and primitive. Only people with no self-control did that sort of thing. He was detached and logical and . . . Rassilon and Omega, it felt so _good_. Warm and comforting, like arms wrapped around him, protecting him from terrible things that lurked in the corners of his mind.

He struggled, but the warmth was relentless and felt too good and now he was wrapped in it, soothing an empty place in him, one he _knew_ he'd never known was there was suddenly full. It smelled like warm biscuits and felt like a crackling fire in December. It sounded like kindly humming by a woman whose face he couldn't see and tasted like hot tea with cream and lots of sugar in a council flat.

Then it was joined by a different feeling, protective and masculine. Like the woman's but distinctly different, it spoke of a sterner sort of protection, the scent of grass, and cold that was bracing and exciting, like penguins in Antarctica and thirty foot high frozen waves. It sounded like a man's exasperated voice as he scolded about locking someone in a cupboard for a joke and tasted like 'borrowed' brandy.

He hadn't noticed his eyes drifting closed, but when he opened them, his timelines, mostly invisible to himself, had clearly become entwined with the couple's, and it felt so right. His head was in Maritejanisavindar's lap, and deep inside he knew he'd found something that had been missing for so long that he truly hadn't known he needed it.

Weeping, overloaded, a thought fluttered through his head before he lost consciousness. _I wish I could have given Susan this_.

* * *

><p>Toranamopandar had a hand on her hearts as they pounded, the aftermath of the scare the skinny man with gravity-defying hair had given her. He looked unassuming, and then she'd said something to make him angry, she wasn't sure what, and he'd turned into a demon. If Maritejanisavindar hadn't intervened, initiating the bond, Time Herself only knew what he might have done.<p>

"Oracles!" the Professor exclaimed from where he was easing his fingers off the other man's temples. "You weren't joking about his instability."

"No," was all she could get out. "Marit?"

The older woman was silent a moment, tears tracking down her face. "He's older than he looks," she said softly. "Like the Pythian priestesses who reach into time. Unbonded in any way at all for all that time, but . . . disconnected for . . ." she shuddered. "A century? Two? I can't tell." Fury crossed her face. "When these people are brought into the courts I hope they _suffer_ for this."

Jon's face twisted and he whimpered before Maritejanisavindar blocked the anger from running through the bond. Immediately he calmed, wriggling like a newborn trying to get closer to its mother. A soft purr, clearly rusty from disuse, emerged from his bypass.

The Professor ran a hand over Jon's head a moment, then said, "I'd better call our children and let them know what's going on. I think we're going to have to wait to have the grandchildren over."


	3. Introductions

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: Okay, I know that looming isn't canon to the TV series, but from what I've seen it isn't directly contradictory to it, and I can easily imagine a hyper-intellectual society wanting to do away with all the inconvenience of pregnancy. Also, I had vague recollections of the Time Lord language sounding like a glockenspiel, but that could just be faulty memory from a totally different sci-fi show, since there isn't a wiki or other reference I could find that said anything useful on the matter. Also, you may notice that when the Doctor hears people calling him 'John' it's written with the 'h', and when it's from someone else's PoV it's without the 'h'. This is because he's thinking of the name, 'John', and they're just shortening the name he got at the hospital. Not that this has any bearing on this chapter. The next one will be a lot longer.

* * *

><p>Honestly, Rose didn't know what was the worst part of the situation. The fact that the TARDIS had crashed and there was a trail of blood that had dried up that looked to have been from the Doctor, who had gone missing while Rose had been unconscious from the crash, or the fact that she'd been picked up by some police sorts, not that she'd understood a word they said at first (and wasn't the fact of the TARDIS not translating at all a terrifying thing), and hauled off to some camp where they put undesirables, who she seemed to resemble.<p>

She'd woken alone in a powered-down TARDIS and had left the wreckage to go looking around to see if she could find a trace of the Doctor. One minute she was walking down a quiet road at night, the next she was being shouted at by a woman in a uniform that looked sort of policeman-like. The woman's police friends had showed up, and when Rose didn't understand them, she'd been summarily dragged off and still had no idea what planet they were on, where the Doctor was or why they'd landed there to begin with.

Eventually the TARDIS had begun translating for them, easing Rose's fear that something truly terrible had happened to the Doctor, but she was still quite concerned that the ship hadn't been translating all along.

It had taken a good few days of keeping her head down and listening to everyone that she'd figured out that the species, whatever they were, certainly only _looked_ human. They were generally telepathic, but sometimes some were born without it. Like a child being born deaf or blind, only they seemed to have taken an out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach to the problem.

She and the others were the local equivalent of deafmutes, hidden away where they couldn't offend the populace, and treated like jail inmates, stamping car license plates and the like to fill their days and earn their keep. It wasn't the worst prison she'd ever been in, travelling with the Doctor had made her a bit of a connoisseur of prisons, but she'd rather be free and finding out if he was okay.

God she hoped this wasn't the time he wound up dead in a ditch. He'd probably just regenerate, but the last time hadn't been so fun, and how'd she know if it was him if he were a new person? Not just on first sight she wouldn't.

She was ensconced the in corner of the prisoner canteen (the guards called it the meeting room, but who were they kidding?) that she'd made her own, when suddenly a middling dark man, he looked sort of Spanish, sat next to her. "I'm Natanerialon," he said. "You?"

"Rose Marion Tyler," she replied. Really, the names people here had. Silly and long, and she'd taken to giving out her full name just because they looked at her less weird with the full one than just, 'Rose'.

He nodded, then his lips pressed together in irritation. "I'm sure you're wondering why I'm joining you over here," he told her. "It's because you're like me," he explained. "Someone who was only just picked up by the Institute for the Head Blind." He glared at the guards a moment. "As though the fact that we're born head blind makes us dangerous," he growled.

"I don't know," Rose said honestly with a shrug. "To tell you the truth, I'm not even from this planet."

He shot her a strange look, then said, "Really? If you're an alien, why don't you look like one?"

She smiled a little. "S'what I asked the Doctor," she told him. "He says that we look like him, not the other way 'round, because his species is so old."

His eyes narrowed at her. "Well, there's got to be some difference," he said. "Not that I believe you, mind, but you're the first person in here who hasn't been suckered in by the party line that the head blind can't work because they don't understand other people or some such." Nat . . . whatever the rest of his name was, eyed her and said, "So, what? Three hearts? Two respiratory bypasses? Pyrokinesis?"

"Sorry," she said blithely, "Just the one heart and no respiratory bypass at all. I still don't know what that . . . is . . ." she trailed off as a thought occurred to her. "Oh my God. But the Doctor said there weren't any more of his people left. He said his planet was destroyed." He'd said he'd know, in his head, if there were anyone else left, but he'd been wrong about things before this. She forced her attention back to Nat-whatever.

He stared at her, then said, "I'm sorry, but I have to check . . . I . . ." he trailed off looking very uncomfortable, then suddenly put a hand on her chest. First one side, then the other. "You really do only have one heart," he said, stunned. A moment later he'd insistently got her out of the room and down the hall, into a little niche. "My brother's a doctor," he said. "Let me study everything he did. He's been working on a sort of telepathy aid for the impaired," he explained. "I used to help, so I know a lot of anatomy. Can I . . . I need proof if I'm going to believe that you're actually an alien."

"Depends what you want it for," Rose snapped, pulling back. "Gonna make a quick quid selling me out to the papers and such?"

"No," he said eagerly. "But if you're a nontelepath, a space travelling nontelepath, then you can help me prove that the head blind can be useful members of society, that we don't need to be locked away because we're incapable."

She eyed him sceptically. "How are we going to do that, and why are you believing me so easily anyhow?" It occurred to her that asking that was kind of a silly question, sort of looking a gift horse in the mouth and all, but really, she could just be a mutant with one heart of his species and lying through her teeth. Obviously she wasn't, but he didn't and couldn't know that.

"You couldn't possibly be as healthy as you are with only the one functioning heart," he said, "Unless you were supposed to only have one heart. But even the latest developments in bioengineering can't change someone's gross anatomical makeup that much."

She sighed. "So how do you want to do this, because-" the point she'd been about to make was made as a load of guards showed up at their alcove.

The guards informed them that, "Residents are not to engage in fraternisation."

"Does that mean none of us ever gets to have sex ever?" she asked. "Isn't that a little unfair? I mean, s'not like we've done anything wrong, just been born not able to talk to other people in our heads."

The youngest of them looked at her and said, "It's been proven in various studies that people who are deprived of telepathic contact become unstable. It would be dangerous to allow all that instability loose in the population."

"So . . . you're keeping them from having relationships, making them even more cut off from people?" Rose asked. "That doesn't seem smart."

The other guards just hauled her off to the cell she shared with that poor woman who seemed to have totally withdrawn into herself, but the youngest frowned, seemingly taking what Rose said into consideration.

The next day, she caught up to Nat-whatever, and pointed out the guard to him. They agreed to try to work on him when they could. Having someone be an in into the system could only help.


	4. Bonds

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: As promised, a longer chapter. In other notes, purring is a thing that I borrowed from Saavik13's fic, 'Linger'. If you have comments, issues or complaints, do drop me a line.

* * *

><p><em>Good morning, Jonerylandesmith,<em> he heard as he slowly woke. He felt disoriented, but so warm and comfortable that a purr erupted from his chest before he could help it. Immediately a distant memory of being told that only babies and primitives would do such a thing crossed his mind and he slammed his control into place.

_No emotion, just logic. No reaction without thought. Susceptibility to base emotions is a sign of a flawed temperament._

_That sounds like an awfully dull way to live. Rather unfulfilling_, the voice from before said.

Next to his hospital bed was the white haired woman. She smiled and switched to verbal communication. "It looks like, despite your rather impressive mental skill set, you have no knowledge of coping with mental privacy within a bond."

She could read _everything_? Terror swamped him a moment. No one should be able to. He knew that much. He'd always got in enough trouble just for acting as he did, if they'd known what he was thinking all the time too . . . it didn't bear thinking of. _Who were 'they'?_ he wondered a moment before he slammed mental shutters down over the thought. Something in him said he didn't want to remember. He promptly forgot about the whole mental debacle.

"Easy," she soothed with a smile. "I'm sure that with what you know it shouldn't be hard to put barriers in place. You're a grown man, after all. It's not like I'll need to be after you the way I was with my son when he went through that naked phase when he was five."

Her mind sent his an image of a small boy, refusing to wear clothing because it was hot and he didn't see why they should have to, and her attempting to instil some basic social mores into him. He smiled a little at that, then realised it was just the two of them. "Where's the Professor?" he asked. Right, she had a – what was the term? Bondmate? Sounded terribly odd to him.

"He has classes to teach at the Academy," she said with a careless shrug. "Torana asked me – Dr. Toranamopandar," she clarified, "Asked me to do this, be a parent bonder for you due to our professional connection, as much as for the fact that I've done it with my adopted daughter too. She was a child then, of course, but I've still had that experience. Also, you may recall she told you, I was her mentor at the Academy when she was doing her practicum for psychotherapy."

It made sense. "So that you could have a better clinical grasp of my treatment, even as your neutrality has been compromised by this . . . bond."

He suddenly felt a brush of masculine awareness, a warm regard gliding over his mind, the feeling paternal. Or rather, he could recall feeling that way for someone else . . . Susan! Dark hair and eyes and a mischievous smile slipped into his memory. He'd felt that way for Susan the way this mind felt for him now.

"Susan?" Maritejanisavindar asked.

The words slipped out easily. "My granddaughter," he said. He could recall her face and something of what she'd been like, but everything else to do with her slipped through his grasp like sand, leaving him with only a few small impressions.

The male mind, which he presumed to be the Professor, seemed to give due consideration to those few images. _Maritejanisavindar said you were older in the way the Pythian priestesses are, but I hadn't realised it was quite that significant,_ the man told him_. My last class just ended, so I thought I'd look in, now that you're awake._

This . . . awareness would take some getting used to. _Thank you, I think._

John returned his focus to the room as Dr. Toranamopandar came in. "Well, you're certainly free to leave now," she said. "Marit signed you out, as your current state is . . . erm . . ." she flushed a little.

"I'm not legally responsible for myself yet?" he asked a little dryly. He supposed it only made sense from their perspective, given that they seemed to feel he was unbalanced without this . . . parent-child bond. It also seemed to hold no water with anyone that he was older than this woman who was apparently to take a maternal role in his life.

"Unfortunately not," Dr. Toranamopandar told him. "I know you may not feel it, but it's been my professional opinion upon my scan of you that you are, to be perfectly frank, extremely ragged around the edges. Very close to a breakdown, in fact. I cannot tell what was preventing it, but whatever it was is most likely unavailable at this time." Almost a hint of memory, a flash of scent too fast to identify, a hand in his own, and then the thought was gone, shoved hastily away as it threatened to bring on an avalanche of something terrible. "Your telepathic strength alone makes you somewhat dangerous," the therapist continued, seemingly unaware of his momentary lapse, "and I've never seen a temporal lobe so highly developed and trained." She looked at him very seriously. "This is not something I am telling many people, but I believe you need to be aware of it. The damage to your psyche from the lack of bonds, your specialised training and most particularly the mutations in your genetic structure, anatomy and brain chemistry speak to your having been subject to some very dangerous experimentation." She began to pace, nervously. "It's my belief that you're an escapee from some sort of . . . of . . ." she gestured vaguely, clearly searching for the right term.

"Laboratory experiment?" he offered. "A programme of some kind to build a perfect something-or-other?"

"Yes," she told him. "Melodramatic, but it seems to fit the facts as we have them."

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth," he quoted at her.

The doctor smiled weakly at him. "I'd rather it be something less dramatic," she said. "But if that's true, someone is likely to come looking for you. The Guards are, of course, aware of what little we can guess at your origins, but there are no records anyone can find anywhere of your genetics, no one who recognises your face and no traces of how you got to the Academy grounds the night you were found."

It didn't sound at all right, but given his rather dramatic apparent origins, well, it was as good a theory as any at the moment. With nothing else to be said on the matter, at least not until he had a better grasp of his own memories, he moved on. "Any chance of some clothing, then?"

Dr. Toranamopandar nodded and said, "The Guard have finished their examinations of your effects, actually. So, I can return your clothing. They want to ask you a few questions, though."

"Of course," he said. "But I can be dressed for that first, yes?"

She smiled. "Of course." The woman with the large ears and nose that still made him think he ought to be reminded of something, although he didn't know of what, handed over a bag, and he hurried into the bathroom to change. Bright blue pants, a lighter blue dress shirt, vest, brown pinstriped suit and a tie of a similar blue to the boxers. As well there were plain white socks and a pair of slightly dirty-looking plimsolls to round out the look. After a few moments playing about with his hair to give it a slightly better look (rakishly tousled with just a slight debonair hint of styling that took a good seven-and-a-half minutes to achieve given the limited means available to him in a hospital bathroom), he stepped out feeling much more the thing.

Two officers of the Guard were waiting, holding two very full bags, a brown coat that looked quite familiar, faces bearing perturbed facial expressions and shifting about uncomfortably. "Yes, officers?" he asked blandly.

"We've inventoried a lot of the contents of your coat pockets," began the man, "But some of the items are rather unfamiliar."

"Oh?" he asked.

"Yes. Not to mention how in Pythia's name you managed to fit all this into your pockets," added the female Guard, holding out the bag in her hands and gesturing with an elbow at the one held by her partner.

They began laying out the items one by one on the hospital bed. "Dickens," John said, at the book laid out first. "Tale of Two Cities." Another item. "Jaffa Cakes." Another. "Oo! Bananas! Want one?" he said, offering one to his new . . . adopted mother? Bond-mum? Temporary legal guardian of his sanity? _Call me mum, why don't you? It's simplest, and I get the feeling you need one to keep you out of trouble_. A gentle caress of his mind sent his eyes fluttering closed a moment. He knew without a doubt that no one had ever done such a thing for him and it felt incredible. He shook his head to clear it and held out one of the yellow-skinned fruits, peeling one for himself and enjoying the delights of rounded and slightly pointy off-white fruits.

Maritejanisavindar took a hesitant bite of the one he handed her, then her eyebrows shot up. "This is excellent," she said.

"Exactly," he replied. "I keep telling people. Bananas are wonderful. Not like pears," he said as another fruit was laid on the bed from the bag. "Like that one there. Why did I have a pear? Nasty, vile things. Gritty and squishy and awful. Who would do that to a person, putting a pear in their pocket?"

"Someone who liked pears?" asked Maritejanisavindar with amusement as she wrapped her mouth around the strange word.

He shot her a look of annoyance, because how anyone could like something so vile was beyond him, then identified the bit of transdimensional stabiliser, travel toothbrush, Venusian spearmint gum, two kinds of lip balm, one cherry flavoured and one strawberry, (who was that for?) spare pair of converse, spare pair of women's trainers, (for the same woman that would use the lip balm?) dressing gown and pyjamas he instinctively identified as 'Howard's jimjams', one cassette tape, one vinyl album and one CD, all of the same Elvis album, pair of sexy specs, two towels and, "My sonic!"

"Your what?" asked the guardsman.

"My sonic screwdriver," he said happily. "Oh, look at you," he crooned to it, well aware he looked daft, but Rassilon, he hadn't even known what one was a minute ago and now he couldn't imagine how he'd ever forgotten his best non-sentient little friend.

A few more odds and ends and a jumper that was entirely the wrong size for him later and they were finished with his pockets. The Guards, Maritejanisavindar and Dr. Toranamopandar all gaped as he stowed his belongings back in his pockets. The investigators asked him a few questions, but since he still couldn't remember any specifics about anything to do with where he was from or who he was, they were forced to leave, still looking oddly at him the whole time.

"Really," he said after they'd left, "You'd think they'd never seen a man with pockets that are bigger on the inside."

Maritejanisavindar shot him a look of mild reproof. "You forget that I'm in your head and I know perfectly well you're being perplexing out of a sense of mischief."

"Ah. Right. Take some getting used to, that," he admitted, ruffling his hair a bit.

She shook her head and took his arm, saying, "Well, since we seem to be finished here, I'm taking you home."

As they left he said approvingly, "Oh, good. There's a little shop. I love a little shop in a hospital. You know it's an even worse hospital than usual when there isn't a little shop. Never trust a hospital without a little shop. Or cats in a nun's wimple." He paused. "Or was it a nun in a cat's wimple?"

"You _must_ have read Orunfarison's _Book of Nonsense_ at some point," commented Maritejanisavindar.

John hastily rifled through his memories, but nothing like that sprang to mind. "I'm not sure I have," he admitted. "I think I'm just like this naturally," he whispered to her with the air of making a dark confession. In the back of his mind was the slightly more real confession, that he did that to keep people from looking too closely.

Her gentle sympathy slipped in through the very intimate (but he had to admit, entirely nonsexual) bond, soothing and warm and a very pleasant shudder rippled through him again, filled with the deep sensation that someone cared about him in a very visceral way, not as a sort of guide to adventure, but just because he was himself. They were in public this time, though, very much in public, and he ruthlessly clamped down on his bypass before he let out that humiliating purr.

_Probably a good idea_, she told him a little wryly. _Otherwise people might think we're bondmates_.

It was easy enough to glance at her timelines, even as newly intertwined with his own as they were, he could still see a fair bit. _Not if they looked at your timelines,_ he told her as they entered what he labelled a car park in his head, and she seemed to call a 'craft stop.

"What about my timelines?" she asked aloud curiously.

He shrugged. "Well, they're all braided up with the Professor's, you know," he replied. He tilted his head to get a better look. "Quite pretty, actually. A little like what you get from a significant historical figure in the long term, the way the timelines are all bound up together. They're less clear since you . . . erm . . . "

"Created an adoptive parent bond," she said with a smile. "I have a few textbooks at home if you want to start off that way," she said. "They're a little old, but it should give you a decent grounding if you want to look more in detail later."

The excitement that always came with the chance to learn about something new he'd never had even an inkling of zipped through him, making her laugh. "But first," he said, still very uncomfortable with the intimacy of the connection, "Perhaps some instruction in how to control this."

Her hovercraft, 'craft for short, was a bright yellow and very sporty. He approved. Once they were seated, though, before she turned the motor on, she turned to him. "It makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it?"

John sighed. "I know you feel that whatever upbringing I must have had was very detrimental, but I cannot help but feel this is a primitive, self-indulgent invasiveness." She flinched. Her feelings of hurt came down the bond clearly making him feel horrible. "I'm sorry!" he exclaimed hastily. "I didn't . . . rude, I am. Very rude, I know that. Rude and not ginger, that's me." He didn't want her to feel bad, he was just explaining and was this why he was always getting yelled at for being rude?

"Probably," said Maritejanisavindar. "I'll try not to take those things personally, but you might consider it an object lesson in why politeness is nice."

"Mmm," he said in deliberately noncommittal acknowledgement.

She shot him a look. "You really do your best to avoid being hemmed into agreeing to anything at all, don't you?"

"Never ever give anyone a chance to insist you agreed with specificity to anything," he responded. "They'll hold you to the most ridiculous sorts of things." Then he shook off the vaguely melancholic feeling the words gave him, as though there were exceptions he couldn't recall to that rule and promises he'd make for others without thinking a moment on it. If only he could remember. "But really, this openness, I can't imagine it's all that helpful when you're trying to get people birthday presents and things," he said.

"Alright," she told him. "To start with, I usually visualise it as the difference between someone having a key to the doors you keep things behind, and not. While my mind is not a literal extension of yours, it's a little like the home of a family member that you have the key to and permission to come and go as you please."

"I have the rather disturbing thought you're going to compare this to having a chain across the door so that things leak through, making the whole of this into a terrifying comparison to a zombie film," John said.

"Zombie film?" she asked.

The rest of the ride was consumed in him cheerfully telling her the plots of several films of the genre that he'd seen and her informing him in no uncertain terms he could keep these 'horror films' out of her house, thank you very much.

They were greeted at the door of the pleasant-looking domicile by the Professor, who told John, "You do seem to have had access to some very esoteric entertainments."

John frowned. "You think? Because the sense I get when I think of them is that they're quite well-known and very popular."

"Unless," the Professor posited, "A certain amount of creative culture had grown up in and around wherever you were before. There must have been other people, after all."

"Fair point," John said, suddenly feeling a painful certainty and memory of a sheer and total solitude. A sense of being alone that was of an all-encompassing nature. For that moment he was utterly and completely alone in the universe.

And then Maritejanisavindar poured care and affection into the bond, the Professor became a wall, blocking out the fear and emptiness he'd felt, that he pushed away by talking too much and too fast. The happy buzzing of hundreds of minds where there'd been nothing but silence, the warmth and caring, it all made him go weak in the knees, feeling arms physically holding him the way the pair's minds were, and he shuddered as that wonderful sense of not being alone permeated him.

It was about then that he became aware of another mind slipping into things, and before he could react to it there was another bond locked into place. His head snapped up and he scrambled to his feet.

"Farah!" said Maritejanisavindar reproachfully. "I told you he needed time and space."

"Mother!" said the younger woman in a similar tone, "I told you I plan to help him. He's going to be my new brother and I know better than anyone here what it's like to go along with severed bonds, the way you feel so completely alone. I would have loved to have someone to talk to . . . to commiserate with."

John cleared his throat. "And you would be?"

"Farahetiakret," she said, smiling. "Call me Farah. If you're family, which you are now that mum and dad have adopted you, there's no need to be formal."

"John Smith," he said, having quite forgotten they'd insisted he have a proper name.

"Jonerylandesmith," he was reminded by Maritejanisavindar. "And it's been terribly remiss of me. Since you really are too old to bring yourself to think of me as your mother, call me Marit."

He shook his head, a smile drifting over his lips a moment, a bit of memory catching him unawares as he said, "Romana, she always did hate it when I called her just Romana. Then again, I suppose I'd been asking for it when I told her it was either Romana or Fred. She picked Fred and I ignored her. She didn't look like a Fred, though."

"What was her proper name?" asked Farah.

"Romana . . . oh it's right there on the tip of my tongue," John said, frowning. He muttered as the memory of the conversation came clear, even if he was sure he was missing things. Like what the blue box was about and how they'd got to wherever they'd been. "Rule one, do exactly as I say, rule two, stick close to me and rule three, let me do the talking . . . what's your name?"

"_Romanadvoratrelundar_,_"_ his memory whispered to him. It rippled through the bond to the others.

"That's a lovely name," Marit said reprovingly. "Why would you act like that to the poor girl?"

Still lost in a bit of actually cohesive memory, he spoke before he thought. "By the time I've called that out you could be dead." He laughed at the memory.

"Well, that at least gives us a little more to go on-" started the Professor.

John didn't even have to think. He knew. "She's dead. Has been for a very long time."

"What happened?" Farah asked, sounding horrified.

It was too much at once, the metal shutter slammed down over his memories, hiding them away again, taking away the horrific fear and pain that had swamped him for a microsecond after the question. "I can't remember," he said flatly, discouragingly. The other three had winced, but he just took the feelings and slammed the door on them. "So," he said to Marit with the practiced appearance at unforced enthusiasm, "You'd said something about the bond being like having the key to the front door. So, how _do_ you lock out the unwanted in-laws?"

_Like this._ A telepathic demonstration, something far more complete and understandable than all the door and lock metaphors in the world. The moment he understood where in his mind the connections were, his usual thorough mental lock and key were put in place. With the bits of feelings still leaking around the edges, he took a closer look at his internal mental framework and saw some bits where he'd let himself grow lax for some reason, places someone could slip into his mind –

"_A door, once opened, may be stepped through in either direction."_

Well, whenever that was, it wasn't happening again. Absitively not. He shoved very, very hard, and suddenly there was a comfortable quiet in his head. The background buzzing of the minds of the people on the planet filling in that background white noise he knew he'd missed, and . . . nothing was leaking through from Marit, the Professor and Farah. He set his jaw as the primitive in him whimpered at the loss of the warmth and comfort in his head. He was not going to wander about acting like some . . . some . . . something at the mercy of his emotions.

The three stared at him. "What are you _doing_?" Farah asked, gaping.

This was ridiculous. He didn't need all this invasive tomfoolery in his head. He just needed . . . but he couldn't remember what it was he did need, because he'd lost his memory and he couldn't recall.

"John," Marit said, and laid a hand over his. Skin contact amplified her telepathic signal, making the door he'd been keeping shut with all his might bounce open. Metaphorically speaking, anyhow. He was flooded with the feelings from the others, feelings of pain, isolation and disquiet with the sudden quiet from his part of the various bonds. "It's alright. You don't have to be alone anymore."

"Not alone," he insisted. "Well, alright, yes, sort of, but not really." He was panting slightly, struggling for some sort of equanimity in the face of this. It felt good, but so did getting a high from Poxicatalian mushrooms. He had to stop this.

"No, John, you don't," Marit gently corrected him. "It's blocking us all out that's the unhealthy thing. You don't need to hold the door closed all the way. Just a little crack."

She had a foot in the door he was so desperately trying to shut. But was he really trying so hard? It felt so good and he liked feeling good. Something said he hadn't felt that good in a long time.

_There's me._

_Something pink and the scent of chips._

_A hand in his that let him feel the mind that connected to that hand, a mind he didn't mind leaving himself open to_.

Even as he found himself reaching and trying to remember more, something in him flinched because attached to that was everything he didn't want to remember. Like Romana, there was something terrible that came with the good, and he was hiding it from himself.

And in that momentary distraction Marit had gently propped the doors into his mind open, like a heavy security door with one of those little rubber triangular doorstops holding it open an inch or two to let the air in. He couldn't hear everything she thought and neither could she hear him, but a general awareness rippled through him.

_Better now?_ Marit's soft mental voice soothed the last of his reflexive fear of mental invasion.

The panic passed as he saw how it allowed him his privacy, but just as you could read the face of a friend of longstanding with ease, it gave them a better hint of his feelings. Nothing more. But he could feel them now, just a gentle whisper of familiarity in the back of his head, strengthened because they were together and talking.

"You do like to analyse everything, don't you?" Farah asked, a little amused and still shaken by his terrified rejection.

And with that he grasped desperately at what felt like normalcy. "Of course I do. How can you really understand something if you don't take it down into its component bits and see how it all fits together? Then you can fix it and make it better. Except for toasters. I don't know why that never works for toasters."

"Toasters?"

It seemed no one around there had ever made toast. They had bread and something awfully like butter, but no toast. This was a travesty he immediately set to rectifying. The rest of the afternoon was spent arguing with Farah (once he'd explained the concept properly with demonstrations and many doubtful looks) about the perfect degree of browning and butter to make perfect hot, buttery toast.


	5. Networking

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: I suppose it says rather a lot about me that I can't seem to make Rose and Nat's sedition in telepath segregation more interesting. Or longer. Here's more fic.

* * *

><p>Another week and Rose and Nat-whatever had finally found a moment for her to prove her alien anatomy. Funnily enough, it had been Rose's discovery that the cleaning solutions they used to reduce certain fabric stains contained ASA that did it. Poisonous to these people she was more and more convinced were somehow magically survivors of the Time War, it was pretty much just liquid aspirin to her. Nat caught her taking a swig one day when she had a killer headache from not enough sleep, and when it didn't kill her was pretty much convinced about her alienness. She supposed if she'd seen someone knock back a swig of arsenic like it was a headache remedy she'd have been pretty convinced too.<p>

She'd also have been pretty disturbed, so she tried not to find his panic over it too funny.

It was sort of fascinating the way they'd dumped everyone in there in a sort of jumble. Back on Earth she was used to deaf kids being sent to one sort of school to learn to cope with that and blind kids another, or at least them having to be taught different things in how to deal with a society where most people could see and hear.

But in this place they'd stuck people who could project telepathically but not receive in with people who were just really, really weak in with people who could receive but not project in with people who couldn't do either in with people who had some other problems she really didn't understand because she wasn't at all telepathic. From what they said it was sort of like being colourblind, but it was so very telepathish that they hadn't invented words for those things and all the TARDIS could give her was effectively gibberish.

"So," she said to Nat one evening, "What we need to do is a few things. We need to stage a revolt, but it has to have some really specific things in mind. I mean, I've seen a few of the people here. They really _are_ unstable, and that means they need to be given help to be made stable or something like that. We can't just say, 'Let 'em all go and it'll work out,' because it won't. And a lot of these people haven't ever been on the outside. They won't know what to do with themselves."

He sighed. "You're right, of course. And we need some way to make them not just send in the Guards to quell us, but to actually listen to what we want."

Frowning, Rose said, "Okay, so if we can pull Luke onside, I may have an idea about that."

"Do you mean the guard, Lucavishiltaman?" Nat asked.

"God, don't any of you people have names a girl can remember?" Rose asked. "Seriously, I know it's probably insulting, but bloody hell that's a lot of letters to remember."

He raised an eyebrow, "Rosmariontyler seems fairly normal to me-"

"That's three separate names," Rose grouched. "My name is Rose, my middle name is Marion and my family name is Tyler. It's just Rose."

He blinked. "That's . . . you have three separate short names?"

"Yeah," Rose told him. "Mum likes roses, so she and Dad agreed to name me that, my Dad's mum's name was Marion, so I got named after her, and the family name, the one that says I'm one of that family, is Tyler. My Mum's name is Jackie – Jacqueline, actually, and when she married Dad she became a Tyler. Dad's name was Peter, and-"

"And the name of his family is Tyler. Interesting," Nat said. "But you call each other by just the short personal names?"

"Exactly," Rose said. "I mean, if you really don't know someone you're supposed to call them Mr. Tyler if it's a man, Mrs. Tyler for a married woman and Miss Tyler for an unmarried woman."

He absorbed this a moment, then said, "Well, the names that you think are so long involve a part at the beginning which will be a plant type or animal type or something of that sort in Old Galfrian, and the middle is . . . when parents first begin to sense their children's minds they use Old Galfrian to form a sort of . . . compacted description of the infant's personality. The end of the name is a little contextual based on the description and the gender of the child."

"Sort of like that Daniel and Danielle are the same name where I'm from, but the 'elle' at the end makes it a girl's name instead of a boy's?" Rose asked.

"A little," he said. "But there are other factors."

She rolled her eyes. "Of course there are, Nat."

"So, the reason you've been calling me Nat is just because my name is too complex for you to recall it all?" he asked smiling a little.

"Not without a lot of practice," Rose admitted. "Sorry, it's just too much for me. Anyhow, I'm just a shopgirl riding along with a 900-year-old alien in his spaceship."

He raised an eyebrow at her, saying, "I think you're underestimating yourself, but we've been sidetracked. What were you thinking Lucavishiltaman could do for us?"

"Well, with everything you've said, it seems like a lot of people think family's really, really important around here," Rose said. "But do people know what it's actually like in here, or do they think we're in some sort of happy colony of people who are treated well and have normal lives and such?"

Nodding, he said slowly, "I think I see what you're getting at. It's true that most people are told that the children they can't bond to are sent here and are happy. Most come here very young and can't clearly recall a life outside the walls."

"And if you think about it," Rose said, "A lot of them are, but just because they don't know there's more."

"Education in here being what it is," grumbled Nat, who'd seen the children's schoolroom in session once or twice.

She sighed, "It _is_ awful, and given where I went to school that says a lot." Then she refocused. "But the point is that if we get Luke to tell people what it's really like in here, lots and lots of families, we might have a chance at getting through because we won't just have people in here who want to know what a forest looks like and whether they can be artists or scientists or what-all, we'll have people outside who want the kids to learn about stuff, and some who want to see their family again that's in here."

Nat nodded again. "Right. So, what we need to do is convince Lucavishiltaman to get the word out."

"Get him to talk to your brother first," Rose suggested. "Because he'd be able to do a lot of leg work for us without anyone getting suspicious." She sighed. "I'd try to contact someone outside myself, but the only one's the Doctor, and I don't know if he's even okay."

"You have to keep believing he's fine," Nate said to her comfortingly. "From what you've said he's clever and good at getting through a tough spot. He's fine."

It was impulse, but Rose had always been impulsive and a little tactile. She hugged him. "Thank you," she said, before he yanked her arms off and scrambled away, wide-eyed. "What?" she asked. Then blanched. She'd forgotten one of the cardinal rules of intergalactic travel. Never ever assume anyone reads your friendly overtures the way you do. "Oh, I'm sorry. That's probably . . . something not-good here, isn't it? It's just different back home and I'm really, really sorry-"

"No, no!" Nat hastened to say. "I'd forgotten myself, you're not naturally telepathic, you wouldn't . . . you see, physical contact heightens awareness of another person. It's really not something you do with anyone outside family or, well," he blushed, "Lovers."

"Oh," Rose said, eyes wide. She'd probably just done the local equivalent of kissing him, possibly with tongue. "I'm really, really sorry. I mean, not that you're not attractive or anything, but-"

"It's alright," he said. "But do people really do that where you come from? Just . . . touch each other like that?"

She tried to think of a way to explain it. "See, since we're not at all telepathic, we can't sort of make someone feel what we're feeling, yeah? Like, you said that parents can tell their kids they love 'em by making the kids feel what they feel for their kids." She bit her lip as she thought a moment, then went on. "But I can't let my mum know I love her just by sort of feeling love for her in her direction. So, we say it different ways. Y'know, actually telling people that, or hugging them, kissing a friend's cheek or holding hands and such." Suddenly she wondered. Because if the people here were the same as the Doctor, and they spent so much time holding hands and hugging and . . . she shook it off. He didn't mean it like that. Not after so many years on Earth could he have meant something more with her.

"That sounds . . . very demonstrative," Nat said. "But thinking about it, I suppose I can see where it would be necessary." He frowned. "It might even be a consideration in terms of us deadheads, creating a sort of tactile language to make up for the lack of mental connection."

"Deadheads?" Rose asked. "Really? Seems a bit much separating out the Grateful Dead fans-" when he just stared at her confused she stopped. "Sorry. There's a band back home called the Grateful Dead and they call the fans deadheads. It's a . . . thing." The Doctor would have got it, but again, he'd spent years hanging around on Earth.

After a long pause Nat shrugged, clearly deciding to leave it alone. "It's what they call us. It's a term for people with a less than full telepathic capability."

Moving the conversation on, she said, "Why don't you take the first crack at convincing Luke . . . a . . . vish . . ." She gave up.

"Lucavishiltaman?" Nat rattled off, looking a little like the Doctor did the first time Raxacoricofallapatorius had come up and she hadn't got it on the first try.

"Rub it in, why don't you?" Rose muttered before they split up to avoid being hauled off for 'fraternising'.

The next day one of the guards pulled her aside, claiming she'd been acting up, which she hadn't, and that she had to be put into Isolation for poor behaviour. As Rose was pulled out of the room she saw Nat protesting, complaining that they'd all been with her all day and she'd done nothing more offensive than take an extra bun on her dinner tray.

Once in the small cell, the guard turned to her. "Whatever you and that Natanerialon are up to, I want to help."

"What do you mean?" Rose asked, a little suspicious.

His lips pressed tightly together, he explained, "My son was born very weak telepathically. They took him before we even had a chance to _try_ some stronger techniques for bonding with him. They don't let anyone who has a deadminded family member work at the homes for deadminders. My bondmate and I went into hiding and it's taken me a very long time to work my way in here."

"You came for your son," Rose said, feeling a deep sympathy for the man.

"He's just weak, not incapable," said the guard, as though Rose would need convincing.

Nodding slowly, Rose said, "Look, what we need to do is get the word out that this isn't some wonderful paradise for people who aren't proper telepaths." Bracing herself, she rattled off the name she'd been practicing in her head. "Natanerialon's brother's been working on a sort of telepathy aid, something to help people adjust to regular society and the like. What we need is to set up people on the outside who are willing to back us up with the government when we start demanding to be treated like real people."

"Right. Then I'll work on that and we'll see."

The guard, whose name was Pal-something-really-long-too, left her in the cell with a look of determination on his face, and left behind a deck of cards. They weren't familiar, but after a bit of sorting she had something that was sort of like the regular fifty-two card deck she was used to, and she settled in to play solitaire.


	6. Investigating Ideas

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: So, if you don't like a lot of, "And time passed," sorts of bits, you're going to hate this part. Also, much time has been spent in wikis and Google to find quotes and scenes from classic Who.

* * *

><p>Jon returned from his latest session with Torana looking very thoughtful. "Something interesting come up?" she asked as he slid into the passenger seat of Marit's 'craft. His sessions had become complicated when Torana had identified one of his memory troubles as being an almost deliberately self-induced continuance of the amnesia. That he didn't want to remember to the point of burying things when he did finally recall.<p>

He frowned, then said, "Well, aside from her entering something that looked like exceedingly sarcastic raptures over my apparent upsurge in honesty, she suggested that I start to track everything I experience that feels like it's simultaneously wrong and right."

"Wrong and right?" Marit asked, confused. His response was a surge of feelings through the bond that, as she sorted through them, she had to admit had that flavour. "What sorts of things make you feel like that?" she inquired, fascinated.

A shrug. "A lot of things," he replied. "When the on-call doctor started talking to me, that first day, it was as though verbal speech, in this language, in Galfrian, was not something I was supposed to be doing, but at the same time . . . as though I'd been somewhere speaking another language for so long that this isn't the default, but it _is_ the language I grew up with." He shook his head. "You felt it, so many things just feel so paradoxical." He looked out the window at a park as they passed it. "The grass is the wrong colour," he said. "But . . . it's still the right colour."

As a thought occurred to Marit, she slammed on the brakes, nearly causing the poor sod behind her to ram her from behind. Realising where they were, she hastily changed course and started for the Academy, ruefully realising that Jon's native inquisitiveness and impatience had begun seeping into her, as such things were wont to do from bonding. "I just had an idea," she said. "And I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner."

"And that is what?" Jon asked, looking quite unperturbed by her sudden about-face in the traffic.

"You're older than you appear," she said, "Like the Pythian priestesses, the real ones, not the ones you call 'televangelists'." She felt her mouth wrap around the word that, from his explanation seemed an accurate descriptor, but was so clearly from another language. "But we can't tell how old and you can't remember," she continued. "It's the mention that the grass is the wrong colour that got me thinking. What if you're from . . . oh, before the Transportation."

His head snapped around and he looked at her sharply. "The Transportation?" he asked, eyes narrowed. "What is that?"

It was another gap in his general knowledge that seemed to possibly indicate she was right. "About, oh, five hundred years ago, the Five Cities just . . . appeared here. The people went to bed on Old Galfry and woke up here. Five cities and several counties of farmland, enough to support the cities, just . . . appeared. No one knew how we got here, just that we did." They were at the Academy now, her bondmate standing beside the 'craft stop spot she normally went to.

"It's an interesting theory, love," said the Professor as they stepped out of the 'craft. "I can finally call in that debt Professor Tomabakkeropal owes me." He smiled at Jon. "It'll get you into the archives where you can look at the texts we have dating back to that time. Something might spark a better memory than what we've been trying."

"The funny thing is," Jon mused, "That all these things around feel right too, just . . . as though they're supposed to be somewhere else. And I can't put my finger on where, but it's not on . . . Old Galfry, you said?" He frowned. "That doesn't sound quite right either. But if it's been as long as you said, a linguistic shift wouldn't be out of the question."

They walked into the entrance hall, a large mosaic of the Academy's founding faculty in full academic panoply dominating the wall opposite the doors. Something about the mosaic caught Jon's attention and he squinted at it a moment in a look that Marit recognised as his, something-about-this-is-a-little-familiar look. Then he shook his head and followed the Professor through the door on the left and down the halls to the archives.

"You'll have free rein," the Professor told him, "But please be careful."

Jon looked horrified. "Of course I'll be careful!" he exclaimed, was clearly about to say more before he got sidetracked by the stacks of books in carefully maintained preservation, locked into the latest in time lock technology. "Ooo, aren't you gorgeous," he crooned at the time lock itself, then again at the diary of a town mayor, preserved from the earliest days following the Transportation.

Two nine-day weeks into a ten month year, and Jon had established a routine of leaving early, catching the public transit 'craft to the Academy and burying himself in the archives and the history of New Galfry. Farah usually went with him, offering a friendly face and conversation that had no clinical intent before heading off to her job at the local zoo which was near to the Academy for ease of access for the students in the biology department. A month and he was taking lunch breaks in the canteen at the Academy and ingratiating himself to the engineering and temporal studies department professors by absently doing what seemed like half their grading for them. Two and he had friends he was spending time with, going out to watch sports matches with Farah in tow, amiably letting her use him to find dates, and by the third, the Dean of the engineering department was dropping by after dinner with a proposal.

"Look, I understand you're still suffering from amnesia," he said, "But the fact is that you seem eminently qualified to teach or research in any number of fields. The fact that you're moonlighting as a tutor of late tells me that you might well be an excellent teacher. The only thing you lack that would keep the Academy from hiring you on this minute is the official qualifications. I'm here with a proposal about that."

Marit frowned as she felt a surge down the bond of nerves. A slight prod produced mild panic and a wisp of one of those memories he was hiding from himself.

"_Find a planet, get a job, live a life, same as the rest of the universe."_

"_I'd have to settle down. Get a house or something. A proper house with . . . with doors and things. Carpets. Me, living in a house. Now that, that is terrifying."_

"_You'd have to get a mortgage."_

"_I'm dying. That's it. I'm dying. It is all over."_

That was interesting. Marit didn't broach the topic, though. She just pressed reassurance through the parent bond the way she had when her children had been given to nightmares. He didn't give any outward sign to the Dean, but he still paused internally every time she did something like that, as though savouring the sensation. If she hadn't known it would probably be bad for him, she'd have buried him in maternal affection and warmth just to feel his happy internalised purring.

"What we had thought would do, would be for you to test out of the various courses you would otherwise need for your initial specialisation, and if you produced a thesis, a project relating to that area, mostly just to offer proof to anyone who asked that you really did have the education to be granted the degree, you could be set up with a professorship in a year's time." The Dean stood, anxious about this recruitment.

Marit, curious about his reasoning behind this very unusual offer, sent a query to the Professor, then couldn't suppress her amusement as the answer was nearly instantaneous. Jon was playing for time, a remarkably guileless look on his face as he asked about courses on offer to audit out of curiosity and fees and payments and salaries. _What is it?_

The Professor slipped into the conversation. _The Academy in Delta City just got a new professor, some sort of prodigy of temporal mechanics. Apparently he wants to have someone equally impressive added to the stable of professors, and the fact that you seem to have absentmindedly revolutionised time lock technology with a few throwaway words to a graduate student in the canteen last week, well,_ a mental shrug.

Jon came on point then. "Look, I'll be blunt. I enjoy teaching and tinkering, but spending inordinate amounts of time writing papers to prove something to people just because they can't be bothered to do the maths I can do for themselves is really of no interest to me."

_You should still think about it,_ Marit told him. _You need to have something to do with yourself, and you're too intelligent not to cultivate the respect you could have with real credentials._

"Let me think about it," he told the Dean. "I'll get back to you in a week or two. The academic year's almost over, nothing would be properly started until a few months from now anyhow." The man had to be satisfied with that and left, sulking.

She was going to try to pry out of him some sort of an answer about his intentions, but was distracted by her son, Vercingetorix (a name that made Jon snigger internally for some reason relating to sword-bearing heroes), and their grandchildren, Anatorianditar and Galentopdrian. Jon befriended the children at once, settling so easily into the role of beloved uncle to little Ana and Galen she'd have thought he'd been part of the family all along.

He set out to teach them how to play some game he called Cricket, involving whacking small balls with a flattened stick of wood, running about, generally destroying all her hard work in the garden and acting as though he were the same age as the children, rather than older than her hundred and ten years of age. Farah ran interference, abetting his bad example, even if she didn't join in.

Marit could feel though, the way the children wanted a family bond with their new uncle and he dodged and twitched in his head to avoid it. Galen and Ana both took it in good part at first, but as the afternoon wore on, it was clear they felt rejected. Ana shrank away and curled into her father, but Galen took it as an affront on his sister's behalf. "Why don't you like us?" he demanded finally.

Jon frowned in clear confusion. "What do you mean? You're both brilliant and fun and why wouldn't I like you?"

"'Cause you're not letting me or Ana feel you in our heads like Auntie Farah or Uncle Shan or Aunt Gus or-"

"Galentopdrian," he interrupted, "It's not that, it's that," he paused putting together the right words in his head. "My head's not a very good place. Frankly, I worry about your grandparents in there, and your Aunt Farah. It's not a place for children."

Marit rolled her eyes internally, sending him the sense through the bond and prodding him with the point that telling that to a brash and inquisitive little boy was asking for trouble. "I'm not scared," Galen replied on cue.

Jon froze, and then Marit saw his eyes seem to darken to black, it was as though the temperature in the yard dropped, and rolling through them all was a bleak, empty, howling storm that said the words, _You should be_.

In one of those universal moments of the worst timing imaginable, Galen had one of his fits. He was so sensitive to timelines that sometimes he just couldn't help reading them and just acting like a conduit for what he saw. The Pythians had been at Verce and his bondmate to hand Galen over, and they continued to tell the priestesses to shove off. But that didn't stop him from getting lost in timelines.

"You should remember that even the best of healers must sometimes amputate and cauterise to save the whole," Galen said, face blank. Marit felt panic and sadness well up. It had been a nice family picnic in the back yard, and now Galen would be trapped in timelines for the rest of the day, exhausted from it for a month and everyone in the family knew the other children gave him a hard time about it. "You never betrayed the name you chose, Theta, and your solution was not death, but life."

He turned, about to say something else, when Jon knelt beside him, looking sympathetic. His hands rested on the boy's temples. "Shh, son. Let it go. There's a good lad. You see? Just a little wriggle here and a twist." He murmured into his mind and ears, gently guiding him free.

In that moment they could all feel something momentous in Galen's timelines, in Jon's and something a little wider than that too, and they all held back as Jon led the little boy inside. In such a short time that Marit would never have believed it, Galen came out, acting utterly himself, a new family bond between him and Jon, both of them still looking a tad flummoxed.

"It's okay, Ana!" he shouted to his sister.

Ana took her cue from her brother, darting over. Clearly Galen passed something along to her through the sibling bond, because her eyes filled with tears. "Your head's not scary," she said, "It's all lonely."

Jon objected immediately. "There's lots of scary stuff up here," he said, rapping on his skull with his knuckles.

"But that's stuff you remember and nightmares and things," Galen declared. "Not _you_."

"You saw-" Jon started, but Galen interrupted, shaking his head.

"That's not _you_," Galen insisted. "That's who you have to make yourself be in order to do stuff, not really you."

"Out of the mouths of babes," Jon murmured. And then the three were off again, causing trouble like a little pack of savages until the Professor took all three to task, making Jon mutter rebelliously, "What's the point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes?"

Jon left a bit of paper with Ana and Galen and refused to tell anyone else what he was up to. Over the next few weeks Marit and the Professor learnt exactly what that was. Because amidst Jon's knowledge of physics, engineering, temporal mechanics, chemistry, maths and biology, he also had an incredible mastery of his telepathy and time sense. And he'd devoted that mastery of his time sense to helping Galen train himself to see timelines without being drawn into them. Ana and Galen both were under strict orders from their new uncle to call him any time day or night if Galen got lost in timelines.

The first time the video caller rang in the middle of the night, Marit had found herself shoved out of the way when she tried to tell Ana to go back to bed. Jon had stayed on only long enough to get the gist of the situation before bolting out the door with the keys to Marit's 'craft in hand.

In about enough time for Marit to make herself a cup of tea and a midnight snack of jam on that toast Jon had addicted everyone to, she was getting a call from her son, looking perplexed. "Mum, Jon's here and he's closeted himself with Ana and Galen and . . ." he paused, looking simultaneously upset and relieved. "What exactly am I supposed to tell the children? I mean, they can't be calling Jon in the middle of the night all the time, but Galen's better already. He pulled my son out of those timelines and whatever he's doing is making Galen feel better so much more quickly."

"At this point, Verce," Marit said, "I think it might be worthwhile to let Jon help. He doesn't sleep much, so I doubt the children will be disturbing him overmuch. I mean, most of us need at least an hour a night, but Jon really seems to only need maybe an hour every few days to do alright." She shook her head. "And from the way he stole my 'craft keys before heading out, I suspect we're not going to stop him anyhow."

They certainly couldn't, and Jon was seen regularly dropping everything he was doing to hurtle off and help his new nephew out. As the weeks passed, though, the calls got fewer and Galen became happier and happier as an impressive control and understanding of his time sense and of timelines generally emerged.

In the meanwhile, Jon also had a minor breakthrough in his regular sessions with Torana. One day while sitting in the 'craft stop to pick Jon up, and also tell him for the hundredth time that he didn't get to drive a hovercraft until he'd passed his driver's test, the adorable idiot, when he sent over to her that _Torana says she needs to talk to you. I think she wants to tell you to make me tell you everything I just told her, which I won't because it made her quite unnecessarily angry over the whole affair._

She was upstairs in a trice, rolling her eyes at Jon as he sat flipping through a several-month-old magazine on a table that was aimed at middle-aged women and filled with recipes and 'magical' exercises designed to make them look youthful again.

Once closeted in the office, Marit asked, "So, what did you want to talk about?" Torana was nearly vibrating with outrage.

"Jon," she said. "I need you to remember that I am asking this precisely because I don't want to violate the confidentiality of what you tell me. But I want you to talk to Marit about the experiences you detailed to me."

He looked up and let out a much-put-upon sigh. "Really? I mean, it's hardly the most shocking thing. Based on how everyone seems to think I was dreadfully abused as a child, don't you think the Untempered Schism would be rather par for the course?"

He was using those terms from another language again, but the sense she picked up was that it meant normal. The look on Torana's face suggested something very different. "You don't think that an abusive childhood is normal, do you?" asked Marit, worried about the whole thing.

"What you call abusive, I'm calling as normal where I'm from," he replied bluntly. "Not that it was necessarily the best thing for everyone, but I really think you're a tad overdramatic about this."

"Jon," Marit tried again, "I know we must seem repetitive to you, but truly, for all your skills and appearance of being well-adjusted, you're very much not. Whatever happened to you was nothing like _right_. Even if it passed for normal wherever you were raised."

The anger that always hid so close to the surface with him began to roil. He launched himself to his feet, pacing angrily while the coat he loved to wear billowed behind him. "Why is nothing enough for you people?" he demanded. "Bad enough I have to have everyone always creeping around in my head all the time, pushing me to stay in one place, get a job, make connections-" he was so agitated and Marit could feel the longing underneath his ire for a deeper connection. She gently slipped calm and reassurance through the bond, making him stop dead a moment, shudder, and the fact that he purred at something so simple made her feel terribly sad for him. He whirled around, snapping, "Stop that. I'm not a child or a . . . a . . . hedonistic primitive."

"I thought there was no point to being a grown up if you can't be childish sometimes," Marit said softly.

She felt something in him twist. Something so deep-seated and visceral that she just knew it had been there for nearly his whole life. "Childish, yes. But within reason. The Looms were there to free us from unnecessary ties and . . . and to make it all more organised. You have to instil discipline early," he was reciting something from memory now. Clinging to whatever framework he'd been raised with. "Can't have people unable to contribute because they're distracted by primitive notions of morality and . . ." he shuddered, trailing off.

"Jon," Torana said into the silence left after he came to a halt. "I know it's hard to let go of something that's held you like this your whole life, but you've agreed you'd never want to put Galentopdrian and Anatorianditar through what you went through."

"It's not the same," he replied desperately. "I was loomed to the purpose, we all were. Millennia of genetic modification to ensure the best possible genetic models, heightened sensitivity to time and timelines, the ability to use time amplified, intellect, everything improved to the utmost possibilities and probabilities allowed by physical limitations. We weren't the same!"

"You were children," Marit told him.

She could feel a tension in him, a need to run rising rapidly, and was suddenly struck by what could only be a memory. One of Jon's memories, it was so strong he couldn't seem to pull himself out of it. Marit was vaguely aware of Torana monitoring Jon, trying to pull him out of it, but she found herself being pulled in, throwing a line back to the Professor to ground her right before she was catapulted into the moment that gripped Jon.

_He stood before the ring, eyes on the Seal of Rassilon, eager to get on with things. After all, he was eight now, old enough to look into the Untempered Schism and go to the Academy. Then the signal came to look up. And he looked, and . . ._

_He could see everything. All that was, all that is, all that ever could be. He saw how space and time were just aspects of one another, how choices and timelines and people and places and things all came together, twisting and turning and in constant motion from the actions of all three. Could feel the immovability of some spots and the pure fluidity of others. Felt the sheer size and scale and . . . bigness of it all. Felt how, if he knew how, he could reach out and change everything to what he wanted it to be. Saw everything he could do and be and become. Felt probabilities change and shift as each new thing he saw and felt and processed made him want something different._

_And he wanted to see it all. Wanted to be in those places and times, all at once. Wanted to leave Gallifrey and race across space and time. Never stopping, always moving, needing to always see and know more. _

_But it was too much. He couldn't focus on one thing, couldn't see only one thing, it was just all there, all at once. And he began to feel all the pain and the suffering and horror that was there along with the beautiful things. Too much. It was too much now, he could feel it overwhelming his mind, felt as though his skull was too small to hold it all, it was going to kill him. Kill him like the infinite numbers of people whose terror and pain he could see in that crack in all reality. _

_Burning. People in so many places._

_Everything was burning._

_He tensed, knowing that if he didn't run now, he'd burn with them._

_In the split second before he fled he swore he'd make it stop. Make it better. He could have both. Run to see everything and run to escape the burning. _

_He ran._

Marit was shaking, the ghost of a headache in her temples. The sense that she should have had one, but didn't, filling her. _Marit?_ the Professor was saying. She had the feeling her bondmate had been calling a while.

_I'm alright,_ she told him.

When she opened her eyes, Jon's face filled her vision, looking exceedingly anxious. "You're not alright. You shouldn't have been in there with me," he said. "Eternity's not really something you should spend a lot of time looking at."

"Oh, Theta, what they did to you," she said softly. "Who could do that to a child?"

He turned away. "Everyone has adulthood ceremonies."

She could feel how trapped he felt, how deep-seated the need to run truly was. In this moment she couldn't do anything but indulge it. He was still shaken from reliving the experience, and she could feel the little niggling she hadn't even truly understood until that moment was his visceral need to _move_ and to keep moving. "There's a museum in Lakeview City with the largest collection of Pre-Transportation artefacts in the world," she heard herself saying. "You should arrange a trip for yourself out there. See some more of New Galfry."

He smiled. "I think I will." _Thank you._

Then he was out the door and gone.

"What in Pythia's name did you just do?" demanded Torana.

Marit pulled herself up. "Figured out that his restlessness comes out of more than just the way he's looking for a bond to give himself meaning. He needs to run."

And that was all there was to it.


	7. Fear and Hope

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: A few of the names of places here are taken from actual Doctor Who canon and then messed with to indicate the linguistic shift that most likely would have occurred between the Gallifreyan equivalent of somewhere between the industrial revolution and the 21st century, and by the time the Doctor is born. Or loomed. Or whatever. Because that was a long time, and linguistic shifts happen.

* * *

><p>Nat caught up to Rose the day after she was released from Isolation. "Are you alright?" he asked.<p>

"I'm fine," she said. "Did that guard, Pal . . . bloody hell, did he talk to you? The one who dragged me off?" she asked.

Looking intrigued, he said, "No, why?"

Glancing around, she tugged him hastily out of the way of any listeners. "He said that he got in here under false pretences. He's looking for his son. He said they took the kid away before his parents could try, what was it? Stronger techniques to bond with him."

Nat's eyes widened a moment, then he said. "That's clever. The ways people induce bonds between lovers is . . . intense. Because you're looking to induce the same strength of a bond in someone without any sort of genetic tie, it has a different sort of approach to it." He nodded thoughtfully. "That could certainly create a stabilisation sort of thing for a child who was just too weak to finish the bond on his or her own."

That made her wonder a little if the Doctor could have one of those bonds with someone like her, someone who was just human. She internally shook off the thought, because he wasn't that way with her. She suddenly realised she'd better say something. "Huh," Rose said. Then continued grasping at something to say so she wouldn't sound quite as stupid. "Well, in the meantime, that means he'll help us. I told him about the first part of the plan, so we should probably include him in things, you know? I mean, unless you think he's a spy or something."

"If you don't I'm more than willing to give him a chance, but I'll definitely look out for him." They talked a while longer about creating a network of support outside and what their specific objectives were and how to explain it to the same people who thought it was better they be locked up.

They were interrupted by one of the other inmates. One who'd lived there his whole life, who was a leader among the headblind inhabitants of the institution. "I don't know what you two are thinking, but you need to stop with whatever crazy plans you're making. What would we do out there? Even if we could get regular jobs, you know the guards all look down on us, think we're incapable. In here we're with people like us. People who know what it's like to be . . . alone."

"The Doctor knows," Rose said, determined. "He's been all alone in his head ever since his people died. If anyone would know what it's like to be alone, it's him. But just because you can't feel other people in your head, just because they can't hear you in theirs, it doesn't mean you can't read and write and think and do complex maths and all sorts of things."

Nat backed her up. "The schooling in here for the children is atrocious," he said. "It might be different if there wasn't wasted potential every which way, but these children deserve better."

"Don't you want to be able to have a family?" Rose asked. "I mean, this no fraternisation rule, 's'like they don't want people to have relationships either."

"I don't want to pass on my flawed genes to a child," snapped the man. "What sort of life would that be?"

"So, you don't want to fall in love?" Rose asked, "Go for walks on the beach? Picnic in the park? See a mountain range? Museum?" Now that she'd travelled with the Doctor, the limitations these people lived with seemed even more limited than they would have before she'd left the Powell Estate behind as her home. But even then, to have been told she couldn't save up her money for a week's holiday in Paris, or to go see Stonehenge or the British Museum if she wanted, to save up special to have the trip of a lifetime to somewhere like Australia or Barbados, even if that had been the limit of available ambition, it was more than these people had. "Do you ever get to leave here?"

"Why would we want to-" he started, but Rose's roommate, the woman who had retreated into herself, had crept up to them.

She broke in. "What . . . what is out there?" she asked, gesturing. "I mean, you sound like you've seen a . . . a beach. What's it like?"

Rose winced a little, then nudged at Nat, hoping he'd pick up on the fact that she needed him to cover for her. She'd already seen the grass in the courtyards was red. The dirt seemed dirt-coloured, but who knew about anything else? "Depends on the beach," she said slowly. "Some beaches are all pebbles," she glanced around, spotting a children's play park to the side. "Like in the play park over there. And some of them are sandy, like the sandbox that way. I've seen some where the water's just so cold and dark and deep-looking, and others where it's all warm and sparkly."

"Like that giant puddle that shows up when it rains," Nat said, "Only so very much bigger."

"Sometimes in winter things get all frozen and you can go skating," Rose added. When Nat looked at her, confused, she said hastily, "You can put on special shoes with metal blades on the bottoms and glide on the ice. Some people play games that way, 'cause you can go faster, but it's also hard not to slip and fall."

Nat shot her a sidelong look, but said, "What does my inability to project emotions or thoughts to someone have to do with my never getting to see the Arcalian Woods?"

"Alright! Break it up!" shouted one of the guards who'd finally noticed their little argument and impassioned speeches. Rose and Nat were both dragged off to Isolation for rabble rousing. When they were let out Nat was trembling, and when he saw her he turned and suddenly clung on, his arms briefly wrapping around her.

"What happened?" Rose asked, worried. He was normally so self-possessed, this sudden hugging got her worried.

He shuddered. "Deprivation cell," he mumbled into her shoulder. "They block out the ability to sense other people. The silence, it's terrible."

The Doctor had sometimes got a little like this. When he'd had that bit of sleep he needed once a month, when he'd been reminded of the Time War or something else horrible, he'd get just a bit clingy, just a bit touchy, especially since he'd regenerated. Wondering if maybe it wasn't just a Doctor thing, but a telepath thing (possibly, if her guess that these were long lost Time Lords was right it was a Time Lord thing), Rose laced her fingers through Nat's, trying to offer him whatever comfort she could.

He made a choked noise and burrowed his head into her shoulder. She wasn't sure how much later it was, but he was taking shuddering breaths of relief finally, easing away and letting go. "Thank you," he said. "That was . . . thank you."

"Sometimes you just need a hand to hold," Rose quoted, smiling.

Nat shook his head. "You really don't understand," he said. "When you do . . . whatever you did, I can feel you, in here," he touched his temple, "And it's like all those empty spaces got filled up a moment."

"Really? I don't know how I'm doing it, then," she said. "I mean, I'm not a telepath." A thought occurred to her. "Wait, but . . . I get that you're a receiving telepath, so you could get affected by losing contact and such, but why would anyone bother doing that with the ones who aren't receptive?" she asked. "I mean, if they already can't sense other people, it wouldn't make much of a difference –"

He blinked at her a moment, then said, "I've never heard of anyone who wasn't connected to the Web," he said.

"The web?" Rose asked, frowning in confusion.

"Yes. All Galfrians are connected. But it's not like a bond, it's just a low-level . . . feeling. A sort of sense of . . . I don't know how to explain it," he finished, frustrated.

Rose made a face. Something she'd learnt travelling with the Doctor was that English didn't always have the words to describe something, because sometimes there were concepts that just didn't exist for humans. Like telepathic ones. "So, it's something sort of super-telepathicish," she said, "Because I don't think English has a word for it."

Nat smiled weakly, but he seemed calm and himself again, and he said, "Probably not. Still, you said you're not telepathic, but you managed to create a sort of . . . well, what I think a bond must be like, at least temporarily."

"You think?" she asked. "I mean, I just was trying to . . . I dunno, make sure you didn't feel alone."

"And I can feel the Web again," Nat told her. "It was just . . . I was so panicked I couldn't feel anything anymore."

Rose remembered a Dalek with its ray gun thing pointed at her and being so scared it took her a minute to even hear the Doctor talking to her. "I think I get that."

Nat smiled at her, still shaky, but better now. "I think," he said slowly, "That we need to get through to our fellow inmates before we do anything else."

An idea occurred to Rose. "What about Pal . . . you'll have to find out the rest of his name," Rose said sheepishly. Nat's smile broadened a little at that, but he looked at her inquiringly. "My roommate, who's never said a word, ever, is interested enough in the outside world to actually talk to someone, something she never does, yeah? Maybe we should just start with some books and magazines and things," she said. "Something with pretty pictures and interesting facts that people can understand." She shot him a significant look. "And since that's not anything weird or contraband, he could pick some interesting stuff up next time he's off."

"Not a bad idea," Nat said, nodding. "But maybe you should try talking to your roommate?"

Rose nodded and they hurried to separate. Now that they'd been pegged as troublemakers the guards watched them all the time. She slipped back to her room, cell really, and sat down on her bed, looking at the other side of the room where her roommate was staring blankly at the ceiling as she usually did unless dragged out by the guards. After thinking a moment, Rose just started talking. "I didn't really grow up in the good part of town," she said. "It was just Mum and me, my dad died when I was a baby. My mates Shareen and Mickey, we all used to sort of spend time together 'cause we were the only ones without dads. Mickey was being raised by his gran and Shareen's dad had run off leaving her mum behind. So, we all knew what it was like when people were horrible just 'cause we didn't have two normal parents like everyone else. We'd hang around in the park all day. Shareen used to look at the flowers all the time. That was the big thing she wanted when she grew up, to have a garden all to herself, just like the one in the park."

She chanced a glance over when she thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. "Then we went on a school trip to Regent's Park. Mickey thought the zoo was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. All those exotic animals and things, keepers with trained hawks and such. Shareen, though . . . Shareen just wanted to stay in the gardens. All the flowers and trees and grass. We never saw grass on the Powell Estates, just asphalt and concrete everywhere. I mean, there _was_ grass, but it was all in little tiny plots and things. Hemmed in. It was like a totally different world at Regent's Park. Being in here, it's like being back on the Estate again," Rose said. "That was a fantastic day, yeah? I mean, not just 'cause we weren't in class, although that was always cool. We all just got to see so much that we'd never seen before."

"What about you?" the question was an almost complete surprise.

Rose turned and blinked at her. "What?"

"What about you?" she repeated. "You said Shareen and Mickey enjoyed the gardens and the animals, what did you like?"

"I just . . ." Rose thought about it. "I liked seeing something new," she said finally. "I liked seeing flowers and things I'd never seen before, not even in shops, I liked seeing the animals that no one had as a pet on the Estate, I liked seeing the city out the bus window on the way there." The human girl gave a shrug. "I like seeing new things, yeah?"

Her roommate finally focussed all her attention on Rose. "Natanerialon and you, the both of you only just got here," she said, "You both live on the Outside, or you used to. Mavon . . ." she stopped, then took in a shaking breath. "Mavontarinaven used to talk about . . . about 'hiking'," she said slowly. Rose could almost hear air quotes and capital letters on these terms the other woman found so foreign.

"Who's Mavon . . .tarinaven," Rose stumbled through the name. She was getting better at these.

"He was one of the . . . _assistants_." The company line about the guards was spat with distaste. "He was going to be my bondmate," she said. "He . . . they found out and . . . I haven't seen him since."

Bondmate. That was what they called spouses here, Rose had found out. "You've never said and no one told me," Rose asked, "What's your name?"

"Rivanaterintilar," was the shaky response. "And you're Rosemariontyler, you said."

"Call me Rose," she told her. "And we're working on figuring this out," Rose told her. "We just need to get enough people together to agree, and then we're going to figure out how to demand rights from the government," she said. "Natanerialon and me, we're working on it, yeah? Then we can see about finding Mavon . . . erm . . ."

"Mavontarinaven," Rivanaterintilar said. "You think we can?"

Rose laid a hand on her new friend's for a moment, thinking friendship and closeness at her the way she did for the Doctor and had done for Nat. It seemed to steady her the way it had them. "Oh," Rivanaterintilar's voice was soft. "Thank you. And I can't wait," she said.

"Can't wait?" came an irritated voice from outside their cell. "You. Again. That's it," snapped the man whose proper title was probably something nice, but seemed to pretty much be the warden. "You're coming with me."

And with that Rose found herself dragged off to Isolation. She was there for a very long time. So long, in fact, that she got the feeling someone was watching her and waiting for her to have a breakdown like a normal Galfrian would if they'd been cut off for that long. It was long enough that she lost track of the days, happy to have caught up on the sleep she didn't have hanging around with a species that seemed to need maybe an hour of sleep a day, if that.

After that lost passage of time, she found herself let out of the cell by a wide-eyed and panicked-looking Natanerialon. "Come on," he said urgently. He grabbed her hand and started dragging her down the hall.

He was actually touching her, that didn't bode well at all. "What's going on?" she asked.

"Your roommate, Rivanaterintilar," he explained. "When you got dragged off, she was upset. Then yesterday she just went into a frenzy. I don't even know how, but she turned everyone into a mob. They're rioting!"

They'd been running down the halls of the building that had been their prison for months, and they suddenly burst out into the open air of the exercise yard to see a shouting, screaming, roiling mass of people, armed with anything they could get their hands on, deconstructed chairs and guards' tasers, rocks and dinnerware, spanners and exercise equipment. It was a mess, and Rose swore, pulling away from Nat and using overturned furniture and sheer determination to scale up the wall and grab a megaphone away from the panicking warden.

High above, some sort of hovering skycraft had begun shining lights down on them, and Rose was vaguely aware of threats being issued. She took the megaphone, shouting down to the crowd, trying to get them to pack it in. Murdering the guards and rioting wasn't the way to get things done. Oh, it might bring attention, but they'd just seem like a pack of loonies to the rest of the world.

"Just back off, everyone!" she shouted. "We've made our point, yeah? We're not happy. Now we need to tell them why, explain, get 'em to understand!" There was a lull, her words fell on a crowd that seemed to react positively to what she was saying, both sides backing away.

A sudden pain in the back of her head was followed by blackness.


	8. Sudden Onslaught

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: Cliffie warning. Mostly because I've decided to stick to a single PoV per chapter, and this means that I have to stop there. It's not even that much of a cliffhanger. It's mostly just that it stops a scene in the middle . . . you know what? You can all tell me I stink in the reviews. Right? Right.

* * *

><p>John was ambling around the local Academy grounds when he saw the students crowded around something. "What's going on?" he asked curiously.<p>

"There's a riot going on at the Institute for the Head Blind," said one, wide-eyed. "No one quite knows what happened, but they've taken the guards hostage, and they had some inside help from some of the other guards. One of the ringleaders though, she was being kept in solitary for causing trouble or something and they rioted to get her out. Only now she's been hurt and no one seems to be able to stop things."

"They're replaying her getting hit again," piped up someone else.

He turned to watch. On the television screen a blonde woman raced across the prison-like yard, scaled the wall and got a megaphone in hand. Her voice was familiar as she shouted. Very familiar. The iron walls he'd raised to keep back the horrible memories he didn't want to remember trembled. The man she'd taken the megaphone from picked up a chunk of concrete and brought it down on the woman's head, a flash of red and she collapsed. The mob below, which had seemed to be calming with her words, reacted with fury.

The need to protect her and keep her safe shattered his partially self-induced amnesia.

"Rose!" he exclaimed, everything rushing back. He didn't have the time or chance to acknowledge his memories of the Time War, of the deaths of his friends, Romana, the Corsair, Leela and Andred, he didn't have the time to even bother thinking about how his mind revving up to its usual rapid processing pace might affect everyone else he was linked to as he submerged himself in timelines to see the faster route to get where he was going, to read the probable intentions of the people around him and their reactions to what he'd do.

He felt more than saw the shock of the people around him as he mentally twisted a bit of time around himself to speed himself up and slow down people in his way. He slammed Marit, the Professor, Farah and Galen and Ana to the back of his mind, slamming the mental door closed on those bonds because he had to be sharp and not distracted.

A flick of the sonic and he'd borrowed someone's 'craft, a couple settings later and he was hurtling towards the so-called Institute for the Head Blind.

He elbowed his way past the Guardsmen that surrounded the prisonlike building, uncaring of the people who tried to tell him he didn't have the authority to go in. He didn't bother using the psychic paper he'd had stuck into his Dickens, just broadcast the dark anger that he'd cultivated so long ago as the Time War had raged on, transforming him into the Oncoming Storm. The people couldn't get out of his way fast enough.

It took no time at all to find Rose, she was surrounded on all sides by angry-looking people dressed in prison clothing. Then just a couple feet away from Rose a man and a woman, both looking terrified of him, blocked his path. "Who are you?" demanded the woman. "What do you want with Rose?"

The Doctor nearly turned his anger on the pair preventing him from reaching her when he realised they were trying to protect her. That was his Rose. Making friends wherever she went. Including, he grumbled internally, a very pretty young man. "I'm the Doctor," he informed them.

There was a pause, then the man snatched a bottle of what looked like cleanser off the floor. "What would this do to Rose if she drank it?" he asked.

Frowning, the Doctor automatically glanced down at the label, instantly taking in the ingredients, even as he was about to shove past. Then he realised what he was looking at. A small smile graced his face. "Nothing. Maybe take the edge off a headache." Interesting security question, he had to admit.

"It's okay, Rivan," the man said, pulling the woman aside and letting the Doctor past. "He's Rose's friend."

Rose was lying on a bed that had been set up in the laundry room, chosen from what the Doctor could tell, for its defensibility. He approved of that, given that she'd been attacked. He knelt beside her, using the sonic to check her over. Her poor brain had a nasty concussion from being whacked by the concrete and there was a gash, but her skull was intact, thankfully, and it was the work of moments to use the sonic to ease the worst of the injury and start her healing. The rest would have to wait until he got her back to the TARDIS.

"Will she be alright do you think?" asked the young man. "I . . . it's my fault. I should have kept her from going up there, but she just went so fast . . ." he trailed off shaking his head.

The Doctor looked at him a moment, then said, "Right. Start by explaining where the devil we are and why Rose was being held here."

"My name is Natanerialon," said the young man. "I'm here, we're all here, but the guards, because we're deadheads."

"Deadheads?" the Doctor echoed. "I assume you're not fans of '70s rock," he said dryly. "Imprisoning someone for liking the Grateful Dead seems a tad overdoing it."

Natanerialon shot him a sardonic look. "Yes, Rose said just about the same thing. But what it means is that we're not strong enough telepaths to be allowed out in civilised society. Apparently our collective incapability of forming a normally functioning bond with our families means we ought to be locked away from the decent people."

"They what?" this went counter to everything he'd seen thus far of families on this . . . so-called 'New Galfry'. A new mystery to look into once he knew how a colony of Gallifreyans with no knowledge of their heritage came to escape the Time War.

The woman Natanerialon had called Rivan said, "If you're born without enough telepathy to create a normal bond with your family, they send you in here."

Natanerialon cut in. "Then they gave them the worst education imaginable so that no one growing up in here would know that there was anything better, and told them they were useless drains on society." Every tense inch of him spoke of anger. "My parents and brother kept me away from them, managed to get me a decent education, but they caught me and dragged me in here just about a year ago. I can only assume they thought Rose was like me and brought her in based on her lack of telepathic ability."

"And if someone tries to get you out," Rivan said, "They separate you and . . ." her voice began to tremble and she started to cry.

Now that he knew Rose was alright and he was between crises, the Doctor could feel Marit and the Professor knocking very insistently on the shut down bond between them. He was suddenly reminded of Jackie Tyler and her very significant slaps over her daughter going missing a year and all those other times she'd been unpleased with him.

With that the mental door bounced open and Marit mentally stormed in. _What in Pythia's name is going on?_ she snapped.

_Not now_. He tried to shove her away, but bolstered by her bondmate she wasn't going anywhere.

Finally he grimly shunted the whole of it to the side, ignoring her the way he'd ignored Romana or the Corsair or any number of his old friends if they'd been insistently knocking on the front door of his mind. "What do you mean, tries to get you out?" he asked gently.

"One of the guards wanted to . . . marry her, I guess," came Rose's voice from the makeshift bed. "When the warden found out they sent him away somewhere. Just 'cause he wanted to marry a slightly less good telepath."

"Rose!" he exclaimed with a grin and wrapped his arms around her, feeling the way she always managed to send him that warm sensation of affection and comfort. "I'm so sorry, Rose. I would have been here sooner-"

"'S'alright," she said, easily lacing their fingers together. "I was worried, you know. Where've you been, anyhow?"

He laughed a little wryly. "You may not even believe me," he said. "I seem to have been adopted. It would seem that when I was in hospital they decided that I was so off-kilter that I needed to be telepathically bonded to a family. It's really quite odd."

Rose's eyes went wide. "Hospital," she said, looking worried. "What happened?"

"From what I recall," he said as he dug through the slightly hazy memories, "I took a rather nasty knock on the head when we crashed and was so confused that I was out of the TARDIS and unconscious on the Academy grounds before you woke up. And then I had amnesia."

Her worry washed through him as she pulled herself up to begin carding through his hair in search of a now long-vanished head wound. "Amnesia," she half mused as she looked and he let her. She tended to be a bit happier when she'd had a chance to see for herself. "Well, at least that explains why you didn't get here sooner."

"I didn't remember until I saw that man hit you on the news," he admitted. "I may have suppressed the memories of the Time War and sort of taken you with them." Not wanting her to misunderstand he added, "It's just, so many of my memories of you would have needed me to remember the Time War to make sense of them, so I think I hid everything away."

"And you just remembered? Oh, Doctor," her face softened into sympathy and he sighed. It was habit to skate over the surface of her mind and feel the comforting sense of her in his head.

_THETA!_

He winced. "Just a second, Rose." _Ouch_.

_Then don't you ignore me, young man._

He couldn't stop the snort that escaped him. "It would appear my supposed bond mother's decided to give me a bit of a scolding. Just called me 'young man'."

"Well," Rose said with a mischievous grin, "You are the only person I know who's nine hundred going on four."

_She's got a point,_ Marit told him briskly. _Now, who is she, where are you and what's going on?_

_What do you know about these so-called institutes for the head blind?_

_Some children are born with a limited capacity to make telepathic contact with others and they can't form bonds properly with their parents, something you can tell in the womb due to the paucity of contact between the mother and foetus. Because they tend to be unstable due to the lack of bonding and inability to sense family properly they're separated for their own good and sent somewhere they need not feel the lack in their relationships from observation, but also with the facilities to restrain them should they become unstable._ Marit responded with an underlying tone of exasperation with the fact that he wasn't going to answer her questions at all until his own had been answered.

_Unstable how?_ He asked.

_Attempts to create connections through physical contact,_ Marit replied. _Anything from unwarranted physical contact to rape. And of course violent outbursts._ She flicked him a reminder of how he'd acted that first day in the hospital when Dr. Toranamopandar had left him feeling cornered and he'd responded by nearly slamming his way past her, psychically.

_That, Marit,_ he said rather sharply, _is because I am known as the Destroyer of Worlds for a reason. The Daleks called me that when I destroyed Skaro._

She hissed in shock in his mind as he let her feel the yawning and bleak abyss that sometimes felt like it was his deeper true self. Rose poked him, sharply. "I don't know what you're doing," she told him, "But stop it. There're no Daleks here, and I get the feeling the guards just don't know better than that they're actually bad people. Don't you go all Oncoming Storm on them."

The Doctor took a breath and let the trust and confidence in him that was Rose settle his nerves. Now that he could remember Gallifrey clearly there was a lot about the Master and the Rani and so many others that made sense to him. These people on the 'New Galfry' were Gallifreyan, but . . . different. His mind was racing in so many directions, but as he so often had of late, he focussed on Rose's issue first.

"Rose, have you seen anyone in here acting, well . . . overly touchy or violently?" he asked.

"No," she said firmly. "Although Nat here seems to think that physical contact might make up for a lack of these bond things, and he said his brother's working on a sort of 'bond aid'. Like a hearing aid only telepathic, yeah?"

A man wearing a guard's uniform poked his head in, "How is she?" he asked.

"I'm alright, thanks," Rose told him. "Did you find him?"

The guard's shoulders slumped. "No. They must have taken him to a different facility," he said.

"Find who?" the Doctor asked.

"His son," Rose said. "He got a job in here under false pretenses to find his son. They take them away as babies. He said he thought it was worth trying some sort of more complicated bonding methods, like people use when they're . . . erm . . . getting married, I guess."

He was beginning to get the picture, and it was a very unpleasant one. Particularly given that these were his own people. Weaker, naturally evolved, primitive technology that seemed to be the ancient precursors of what he would have called 'modern' Gallifreyan technology, but so clearly his own people. But this was the dark side of the Gallifreyan sense of smug superiority, and these people did not deserve to be locked away from the world like this. From outside, there was the sudden sound of frightened people, the noise of some sort of approaching massive airborne vehicles.

They were all of them on their feet at once, racing outside. Rose was unsteady, her concussion still present, though nearly gone thanks to his sonic, and he looped an arm around her to steady her as they hurried up. Outside the Guard were descending on the prison, shouting about everyone returning peacefully to their rooms, as though they were expecting a violent reaction. In fact, the whole approach seemed calculated to provoke a violent reaction, either out of fear or out of distaste for the way they were being condescended to.

That would not do. A flick of the sonic and it was on the setting that amplified the voice. "Oi! You lot in the hovers!" he called. "Back off or I'll make you. You get one chance at this, don't waste it!"

"You will go back into the building peacefully or we will be forced to use force!" shouted a man in the lead hover.

"Forced to use force?" muttered Natanerialon behind him. "Really? Don't they have a script for these sorts of things?"

Rose stepped in close. "Give 'em a demonstration," she said. "Warn them you'll do something like," she gestured vaguely, "I dunno, blow something up far enough away no one'll get hurt and then say you'll do that to them. They have to be warned that you actually _can_ do something, or else it's not a fair chance. Besides," she added, "It'd do them in here good to know that they've got someone speaking for them, yeah?"

A quick glance around off the wall showed there was a 'craft stop with a few of them parked. "I want you to take a look at the 'craft stop," he said darkly to the waiting Guard. Two flicks of the sonic and the 'craft farthest away from the walls and hovers exploded. Shouts erupted up and down the walls and in the waiting Guard. "Don't make me stop you," he warned again. He switched over to watching the timelines, bracing himself to duck and dive out of the way of exploding wreckage, block Rose from the worst of it, hoping all the while that a decision would be made that wouldn't force him into stopping them at the gates.

At the same time, though, he felt the buzz of the minds in the prison surge with optimism.

_Oh, Pythia's tits!_ Farah's voice popped into his head.

He couldn't keep himself from snorting at that bit of cursing before he forced the face of the Oncoming Storm back on. "Well?" he called to the hovers.

Suddenly they began to back away and the Doctor heard the Professor saying, _I got through to Varenterlarktior. She's our representative on the World Council. She's always been outspoken on the topic of care for the head blind._

The Doctor asked, _Does that mean they'll pull back and allow some sort of negotiation with the inmates here?_

_Yes. Also, Marit is heading out there with Torana and is currently breaking every land speed record ever made from what I can tell._

She was at that. The Doctor closed off communications to her, then said, _I'll talk to her when she gets here. I've never liked getting shouted at over a distance, and family bond or no, I will not have that argument while other things need doing. Thank you, Professor, and I'll catch you up on everything later._

Now that he wasn't hiding his own memories from himself he knew why he was amused, but now that he could remember, the fact that Ace had always called him Professor stung just a little, as the memories of so many of his companions did these days. He shook off the melancholy. "So, I've just had word from a friend that they've contacted a Council member. Hopefully we can work something out before this becomes a problem situation," he informed the waiting inmates.

Natanerialon just heaved a relieved sigh. "I was worried when things got out of control so quickly," he admitted. "Rose and I, we'd been planning to work up to things, do this slowly and without violence."

"Always better," the Doctor said approvingly. He pushed aside the feeling of annoyance over another of Rose's pretty boys and settled in to getting the lay of the land. The guards who sympathised with the inmates and seemed to either be on their side or at least willing to listen were allowed to circulate with the general population, but the bastard that had hit Rose with concrete, along with his cronies and the guards that sided with him, were dumped into some of the cells that had so recently housed weaker telepaths.

By the time that bit of organisation was finished Marit and Torana had both appeared, Farah following them with a clear determination not to miss the excitement.

"Well, Theta?" Marit asked, arms crossed and glaring sternly at him.

"Rassilon, you look like Leela on a bad day," he said. "All you need is a knife."

Rose glanced at him. "Who's Leela?"

"Someone who traveled with me after Sarah Jane did," he replied. He didn't much feel like explaining the complexities of who Leela was right then. "Bit of a knife-wielding savage, she was," he added. Marit's eyes narrowed and he winced. "Maritejanisavindar, meet Rose, a close personal friend of mine, Rose, this is the lovely lady who agreed to permanently link herself to me in a maternal sort of telepathic bond."

Rose looked from one to the other, then she said, "Pleased to meet you. My mum says he needs a good slap most of the time."

"Rose!"

The glare was incredible. It was like Romana in a temper compounded with Leela and just a hint of the distant parents he hadn't seen in so long he could barely remember them, scapegrace and disappointment that he was. It was rather terrifying. "It's good to know someone other than Mum can frighten him like that," Rose told her. "Really, I let him get away with everything."

"It's lovely to meet you too," Marit told her, sincerely. "However, this does not absolve you," she turned on the Doctor, "from explaining to me what in Pythia's name you've been doing, blowing up 'crafts, joining in riots-"

"I joined in nothing!" the Doctor exclaimed in affront.

"Yeah," said his normally wonderful and sweet companion. "But he's usually pretty proud of the things he blows up."

"Rose, if you're not going to help-"

"Oh, like you're any better around my mum," she told him dismissively. "Now, you said that she's a psychologist, right? Near enough as nevermind, anyhow," Rose added. "Maybe, since she's here, she could do an evaluation of some people. I mean, Nat says that people keep saying everyone in here's all unstable and such." She stopped, looking inquisitively at the Doctor, who picked up on her train of thought at once.

He nodded. "That would be useful, Marit. You and Torana both. Because while I'm getting some people being a tad . . . off, most of them just seem to be the sort of angry and upset you find in the wrongfully imprisoned." He turned to Rose and added, "Rose, this is Dr. Toranamopandar, who's been tasked with being my therapist-"

"Nice to meet someone willing to take on such a thankless job," Rose told her. "Someone needs to deal with his phobia of pears."

"Is that why there were pears in my coat pocket?" he demanded of her. "Rassilon, Rose! This is the coat Janis Joplin gave me! Why would you sully its perfection that way?"

She smiled at him, all cheeky, and declared, "It's aversion therapy. Expose you to something you're afraid of a bit at a time. I'll get you to eat pears someday."

He rolled his eyes.

Marit and Torana both frowned. "Aversion therapy?" they both asked.

"It was a joke," Rose told them, frowning herself.

He intervened. "They don't have that here, Rose," he explained. "Mostly because the sorts of problems cured by that sort of therapy tend to have a more telepathic cure, so the concept of gradual desensitisation to an object of fear or distaste in the way you're referring didn't need to be created."

"Oh," Rose nodded.

The two psychological analysts, as they were called here on New Galfry, exchanged looks. "You'll have to tell me about this," Marit said to him. "It sounds like something with interesting clinical possibilities."

"Nontelepaths do have some very creative ways of working around an inability to contact mind to mind," he said affably. "But we're going to need to put that aside. More, I'm going to need to look into where these theories of instability in the so-called head blind came from."

"Natanerialon?" Farah spoke up, sounding a little dumbfounded. "What are you doing here?"

He flinched. "I . . ." he trailed off, looking at Rose a little desperately.


	9. First Steps

**BRIT-PICKER/BETA STILL WANTED FOR THIS FIC!**

I'm never gonna get the beta I wanted, am I? *puppylike whine of ultimate sadness*

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: And we pick up where we left off. A shorter chapter, yes, but I'm getting to the part where I explain what's going on. Eventually. Not yet, though.

* * *

><p>Rose felt bad for him. They'd talked about things other than plans to free disability-bound telepaths from the 'institutes', things like families and significant others. He'd mentioned Farahetiakret as a woman he'd been close friends with, but had always worried about getting too close to because she might react badly to his secret. And he'd always hated the way she'd been after him to go to one of the academies, but he couldn't risk being caught so he couldn't explain anything to her.<p>

"Nat?" she walked up to him, tapping him lightly on the shoulder. Farahetiakret seemed to wince at that, and Rose jerked her hand back as she remembered. "No casual touch, right," she said. "Did you want me to explain?" she offered.

His return smile was more of a grimace, then he said, "No, I should do it." He turned back to her. "Farah, I'm here because the authorities caught up to me and put me in with the rest of the head blind. Where I 'belong'." His hands moved in a gesture that Rose had learnt meant the same as air quotes did on Earth.

"Head blind?" Farah repeated, sounding confused. "But you're not . . . I mean, you never-"

"Seemed like a grabby basket case who couldn't function in the real world?" he asked her, lips pressed together. "I was going to tell you, and then your mum came home that day, going on about how Varenterlarktior didn't know anything about the psychology of the head blind and we needed to be treated. I didn't . . . I _couldn't_."

"You're . . ." Farah's lips compressed a moment, then she said, "So you found someone head blind to be with?"

"What?" the Doctor's voice was sharp. "That's not . . . Rose?" he asked, sounding plaintive.

Rose blinked, taken aback. "Erm . . . Nat and me, we're not . . . I mean, it's not anything like that," she said hastily. "Really. Really really." She looked at the Doctor who held out his hand to her. She was about to take it, paused, then said, "We need to talk," to him before reaching the rest of the way and telling Farah, "First, I'm not Galfrian, I'm human. Alien, I suppose," she said. "I'm not even a bit telepathic, see, so the touching thing doesn't really mean to me what it does to you."

The Doctor's head whipped around and he stared, then repeated in the same plaintive voice, "Rose?"

She rolled her eyes at him. "Later."

"She really is an alien," Nat said hastily. "Honestly. Only one heart and she drank a whole cup full of a cleaner full of acetyloxy benzoic acid."

"A cup full, Rose?" the Doctor asked her, looking a little disapproving.

She glared. "No one sleeps around here any more than you do. I had a killer headache from lack of sleep."

"You could have overdosed," he said looking anxious.

The others all looked disturbed. "Yes, overdosed on poison," Maritejanisavindar said, eyes wide.

"'S'not poison to me," Rose told them. "Really."

"It isn't," the Doctor concurred. "Although if you take too much you can start to cause problems with the stomach lining," he added with heavy significance.

"We're off topic," Nat said. "You said they're both psychological analysts, having someone take a look at everyone in here might be a good bit of evidence that there aren't any serious psychological problems endemic to the so-called head blind."

Rose nodded eagerly. "Really. We need to be able to tell everyone that people in here aren't violent or anything, because it's the first thing we need to help everyone out and maybe let the ones like Nat have real lives."

The Doctor seemed to have a long telepathic conversation with Maritejanisavindar, who finally shot him a very dark look, a little like the one Rose's mum had given her when she'd insisted on moving in with Jimmy Stone, and then marched off with Nat and the other woman, Torana-something, in tow. Finally the Doctor clapped his hands and said, "Wonderful. Now Rose, we need to find the TARDIS, and then I need to do some research, because there's a very disturbing mosaic at the Academy that I need to examine."

"Or," Rose said, sighing, "We need to set up to help Marite . . . stupid long names," she trailed off. "We need to help them with organising everyone, because some of the people in here really aren't stable, although I think that's probably a bit due to being put in prison rather than 'cause they're really-really unstable."

"Rose," he looked suddenly anxious. "This . . . here . . . it shouldn't . . . these people shouldn't exist. They're not . . . they _are_ Gallifreyan, the same species . . ." he trailed off a moment, his face a study of conflicting emotions. "But they're like . . . they're genetically unrefined," he said. "By my time, after the Dark Times, we'd been modifying our genes to ensure that we collectively had more powerful telepathy, to increase the power and sensitivity of our time senses to the point we could do more than merely see timelines and read fixed points. We could actually manipulate time itself in certain ways. Time Lord isn't just a fancy title you get from the Academy after being bored half to death for a century, it refers to being able to slow and speed up time, to briefly pull yourself and other things out of it. Not just the fact that we had TARDISes."

When he seemed about to continue, she cut in. "So it's like they're what? As if a bunch of people from the 20th century got dragged forward to 200,100, only you don't know how it happened?"

He shook his head. "It's more than that, Rose. When I ended the Time War, when I . . . when Gallifrey . . ." The Doctor shook himself and skipped over actually saying it. "After that I put it all into a time lock. What that means is that I made it so that it's as though Gallifrey never existed at all, because the whole timeline of Gallifrey was removed from time. There's nothing _to_ bring from the past."

"But they're here now," Rose said. "And I know they're not from when you're from, but maybe you should think about making a home here. At least somewhere to come back to. Like Powell Estates and mum are for me." She cupped his face in her hands and watched as he blinked slowly, almost as though he were fighting to keep his eyes open. "I know it's not exactly the same, but you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, yeah?"

"And what if they're here because the time lock is failing?" he asked, sounding a little broken. "I thought I made sure everything was locked away, but the Daleks still got out. What if it's all a symptom of leakage?" The Doctor looked a little frantic. "I have to know. And . . . and that mosaic. Rose, it was a picture of Rassilon."

"Rassilon?" She'd heard that once in a while. He used the name like a curse word. Or maybe the way you'd say, "Oh, God." Seemed to depend on the moment. She'd thought 'Rassilon' was some sort of Time Lord god.

The Doctor gasped out something that could have been a laugh, just a forcefully expelled breath and a pained expression. "He was the founder of . . . of what I would consider modern Gallifreyan society," he explained. "Then during the war they brought him back. They made him the president. And he . . . he was mad. Completely mad," he said, looking away briefly. "One of the things from Gallifrey I do not miss."

"You think the mosaic of him might explain what's going on?" she asked.

"It might," he said. "I need to know if I . . . if . . . if I need to move this into the time lock as well."

"It could be that bad?" she asked.

The Doctor took in a shuddering breath. "If this is something that somehow slipped out of the time lock, the whole of it will start to break down. The Time War would reappear. It would . . . everything horrible that happened because of it, all the species dead and gone because of it would be gone again. Space and time would be in pieces again, the way they were at the end of the war before . . . before I . . ." his voice cracked and Rose turned to wrap her arms around him while he trembled. It was only a moment, then he pulled himself together. "Don't you see, Rose? I have to."

She was about to come with him when she remembered, she had to be there. She had promised to help the people in the stupid nontelepath jail with getting their rights to be part of normal society. But the Doctor needed her too. "I . . ." She was torn.

"What is it?" he asked.

She sighed. "I just promised everyone here that I'd help, yeah? If I leave with you then I'm not here helping, and I promised."

He smiled affectionately, then said, "If I don't have to put this into a lock, I'll bring you right back," he said. "The moment after we leave."

"That wouldn't be crossing our timelines or something?" she asked. Sometimes she just wasn't sure about what counted as crossing a timeline or not.

"You doubt me, Rose Tyler?" he asked, putting on an air of being all insulted.

She rolled her eyes. "As long as you're sure," she said.

Sounding put-upon, he explained as they headed to the car park, "It's not crossing timelines because we'd arrive back there after we've left from here, so I won't know now that I would have found out from the mosaic that I don't have to put this into the time lock. And us showing up at that point would mean that what we do there won't affect what we're doing at the Academy. There aren't two of us in the same place at once, there would be two of us in different places doing things that do not directly affect what we're doing in those places simultaneously."

"If you say so," she said. "That was less confusing than usual. Normally you've got about eight future conditional tenses in a row until I don't know whether we're coming or going."

"English is just inadequate for this sort of thing, you know," he said.

Rose rolled her eyes. "I know because you keep telling me," she told him, taking a moment to figure out the car door handle, which was a little different than any car she'd seen before, then hopping in to join him. "Do you know where the TARDIS is?" she asked.

He shot a sidelong look at her. "Weellllllll, I might want you to give me a hand," he admitted as he reversed the hover-car-thing out and headed onto the street. "But since it'll take us a while to get anywhere close to her, tell me what's been going on the past few months with you."

"If you tell me how you wound up getting adopted," she countered.

They exchanged stories on the drive down, the Doctor being indignant on her behalf, angry for those who had been mistreated in the facility, but there was something in the way he held himself, an inner calm Rose could see that seemed to permeate everything he said and did. It wasn't that he'd stopped being the Doctor, barely able to sit still even in a moving vehicle, rambling on about weird things he'd seen on planets he'd never taken her to, it was just that he had this undertone of something missing.

It was when he talked about getting a parent bond with Marit and the Professor, of becoming an uncle to Galen and Ana, the friends he'd made at the Academy, Rose saw what it was. He wasn't lonely anymore. Not like he'd been before. She'd felt that way on their first trip, seeing Cassandra, the last 'pure human', had made her feel terribly alone. It was something she'd understood on a sort of subconscious level, but seeing the Doctor someplace where everyone was like him, telepathic and time-sensitive and all that stuff, he was indescribably lighter.

Once they were in the area they'd both been found, Rose spotted a familiar-looking house, and from there they backtracked to the TARDIS. Once they were through the doors, he immediately chivvied her into the med bay, running a full diagnostic of her, apparently concerned enough to set every test he could possibly do to running, all the while clucking and doing things to fix her injuries.

Finally she hopped off the exam bed and said, "I'm going to have a shower, change my clothes and you need to go look at that mosaic, Doctor."

He stopped clucking and straightened up, nodding. "I'll take the TARDIS there and start looking around," he told her. "You'll join me when you're done?" he asked, looking anxious.

Rose nodded and smiled in a way she hoped was encouraging. "I'll be out as soon as I'm done," she promised. Then she impulsively hugged him, feeling his arms immediately wrap around her, sighing as she did what she always did when they hugged like this, trying to make sure he knew she was there for him.

Then she pulled away and headed down the hall to shower in privacy and put on her own clothes and not worry about some stupid guard coming to harass her.


	10. In Plain Sight

_Beta?_

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: Even shorter this one, but it might answer a few questions. Or maybe make people very angry at what I just did to canon. Who knows?

* * *

><p>Once Rose had vanished down the hall, the Doctor headed to the console, taking his brilliant timeship to the Academy and taking a good long look and visual scan of the mosaic. He examined the founding faculty of the Academy, but the only face that was familiar was Rassilon, who had underneath his feet a name plate declaring him to be Professor Rassatermudilon. He shook his head at that, picturing the Time Lord he'd known, as an educator, and shuddering at the notion.<p>

The picture was a magnum opus of Rassilon's self-aggrandisement, symbols and indicators of Gallifreyan rank all over the image. He might as well have been swathed in purple and gold lions rampant with a sceptre and crown. It was a little ridiculous.

He headed back into the TARDIS, using her computers to start digging through the public databanks to see what they said about Rassilon. Rose joined him briefly, then went outside to look at the mosaic for herself. The Doctor joined her, pointing at the tiles, saying, "There he is. The man who planned to destroy the universe before the Daleks could."

She turned to stare at him. "What?"

"He wanted to perform the Ultimate Sanction," he told her, lost for a moment in the memory of someone so selfish he'd destroy everything in the universe just to exist a little longer.

Rose broke into his thoughts, laying a hand on his arm a moment before he twisted his wrist and took her hand in his own. At the skin-to-skin contact he could feel the light traces of her mind, the comforting buzz of her thoughts skating over his own. "What's Ultimate Sanction?" she asked.

"He'd planned to turn all the Time Lords into . . ." he struggled a moment to put it into words. "Into beings of pure psychic energy. But in so doing he would have destroyed not just the Daleks, but all of reality."

She stared at him a moment, horrified. "That's terrible!"

The Doctor sighed. "I miss Gallifrey, but there were parts that were awful. Boring, restrictive, uncaring . . . there are people I miss, but the Gallifrey I knew at the end of the Time War . . ." he trailed off. There wasn't much to say.

"I'm glad being here's helped you talk about it," Rose said.

"What?" he stared at her a moment, then realised she was right. He wasn't normally this open, but that comforting warmth in the back of his head, the gentle feeling of affection and love, even tempered as it was by irritation, anger, confusion and any number of other negative feelings, it eased that pain those memories gave him. That sense of family and caring braced him against the horror and sadness that was losing Romana, the Corsair, Susan and so many others. "I suppose it has," he admitted. "It's . . . easier."

But that only reminded him that he was most likely going to have to throw them all into the time lock with the rest of Gallifreyan history, and he turned away, heading back to the TARDIS. At least until Rose said, "That's odd."

He turned around. She was peering closely at the tiles, her nose an inch away from the surface. "What's odd?" he asked.

"Well, if you look really closely at the tiles, s'like there's a pattern on the surface," she explained. "I dunno why, but it reminds me of whatta-you-callems . . . circuit boards."

Joining her at getting a closer look, the Doctor peered at them and inhaled sharply. "Oh, Rose, you are brilliant!" he exclaimed, hurrying back into the TARDIS and starting her off scanning the mosaic, not as an image, but for data storage.

"I am?" Rose asked, following him back in.

He nodded absently, already scanning through the data being collected. "You're absolutely right. Those aren't tiles, at least they're not meant to be. Each of those is a data storage device. It's like a wall of thumb drives," he explained. "They're old tech, at least by Gallifreyan standards. As though someone had stored things on a 3 ½" floppy disc instead of a thumb drive. Only these each hold far more data than any thumb drive ever could."

"So what's the data then?" she asked curiously.

He frowned, scanning quickly through the collected information, wondering as it came in whether he'd get any actual documentation, or if this was just raw data. "So far this is simply the complete genomes of . . . well, a lot of people."

"Gallifreyan people?" Rose asked, leaning over his shoulder.

"Yep," he replied, absently popping the 'p'. "But I don't know why," he complained.

That was when the gene mapping gave way to notes about biological differences between loomed and bioengineered Gallifreyans, particularly Time Lords, and the as-yet unmodified ancient Gallifreyans. And the experiments that had been begun were described with the dispassionate and cruel brilliance of Rassilon. While he'd been a physicist and engineer, for the most part, Rassilon had been very interested in the potential inherent in engineering a new variant on Gallifreyans. But for that he'd wanted the original unmodified stock.

"What does that mean?" Rose interrupted. He realised he'd been speaking aloud.

He turned to look at her. "It means that this was all an experiment by Rassilon. He went back in time on Gallifrey, back into what we now call the Dark Times," he interrupted himself. He was the only one left to call it that. "What Gallifreyan histories call the Dark Times," he corrected. "Collected several cities' worth of people from before genetic engineering even existed, people from a period of time you might consider to be our equivalent of Earth's Industrial Revolution, then brought them here to isolate them. Keep them pure for the purposes of looking at modifications of unmodified Gallifreyan genetics."

"But why?" Rose asked. He'd already turned back to the information scrolling across the screen.

Scanning even faster now, searching for some indication of what Rassilon's plans had been and what, exactly, he'd done, the Doctor almost missed the reference in the notes to the time lock. "A time lock?" he muttered to himself, sending the TARDIS hunting through the notes for the specific reference.

"Doctor?" Rose asked, sounding anxious. He couldn't blame her in the least. This whole situation was mad and a little senseless.

Then he found it. "He wanted to have breeding stock set aside," he said absently as he skimmed the clear and careful description of every step of the process. "So he took the people and placed them into a time lock. He effectively removed them from time, taking the whole planet out of synch with the rest of the universe, effectively bringing the passage of time inside the lock to a near-complete halt. Whenever he wished to return and collect more data or run an experiment he'd enter the lock, do what he needed then put it in place again. But that . . ." he trailed off as the implications struck him.

And Rose broke in, as always asking the important questions. "Does that mean you have to put them into the time lock on the Time War or not, though?"

He was trembling with shock and relief as the answer rocketed through him. "I don't," he told her. "What Rassilon did, it . . . it separated them out from Gallifreyan history. Being in a lock that preceded the Time War, it took them outside of normal time and means that they're excluded from the time lock I had to place on Gallifrey." His mind began to whirr as he took apart the mysteries of New Galfry. "With Rassilon inside the time lock and no longer maintaining this lock, it must have deteriorated. When the TARDIS was in the vortex she must have . . . bumped into the lock, effectively breaking it apart and moving New Galfry back into regular space. That's why we crashed. The time lock here breaking knocked the TARDIS out of the vortex."

"But . . . does the lock on the Time War need maintenance?" Rose asked, confused. "'Cause that doesn't sound safe. I mean, if something happened to you-"

"It's not the same sort of lock," the Doctor explained. He felt a flash of pride over how well she'd taken on these concepts. He'd had companions who never quite caught on to how these things worked, but Rose had a grasp that was often a pleasant surprise. "The lock on the Time War is meant to be permanent and self-sustaining. The lock on New Galfry was designed for repeated access for research. That means it was never fully stable or as fully removed from the normal timestream."

"You know what this means?" Rose asked him, her voice gentle. "You're not the only one anymore. You can have a family."

He'd been avoiding thinking of it. It had been so long, and this wasn't Gallifrey. There weren't two suns in an orange sky, there was no crystal dome over a sparkling capitol and this wasn't the Shining World of the Seven Systems.

But as he stood under a sky that was a pale yellow, he could see red grass and trees with silver leaves rustling in the wind. Buildings and art with the angles and colours he'd grown up around, structures that _looked_ Gallifreyan the way red brick and shingles looked Terran. Clothes with the patterns his companions had thought exotic but to him were mundane could be seen on the people in the street, the Gallifreyan propensity for silly hats coming through in spades.

But most of all, the back of his head, silent for so long in the wake of the Time War, now buzzed with the warm feeling of millions of minds like his own. They were weaker, less trained, lacking the cosmopolitan nature of those used to interstellar trade and alien cultures, but they were his people. "Rose," he began, but there was nothing he could think of to say, tears beginning to prick at his eyes.

"Shh," she hushed him, pulling him to her, wrapping her arms around him in a hug that let him snuggle into her surface thoughts to feel the comfort she was offering. Finally he felt in control enough to step back. Before he said anything else, Rose told him, "I know it won't be the same, but it's better. You're better, I can tell."

"I am," he said, amazed. It was incredible. He wasn't alone. He was still the last of the Time Lords, but he wasn't the last Gallifreyan. Already there were books in these libraries and computers in their academies that held the beginnings of circular Gallifreyan. The potential they all had to see and manipulate time was incredible, more incredible because they weren't genetically engineered to do it, they just had it. But that brought his mind back to Rassilon and his experiments. "And now I know where the segregation of the so-called head blind comes from," he told Rose grimly, leading the way back into the TARDIS.

"What do you mean?" she asked, standing next to the console as he flipped the few switches he needed to in order to send them back to the minute after they'd left the prison in his . . . hem . . . borrowed 'craft. "Doctor?"

The transition was fast and smooth and he sent a grateful thought to the TARDIS for her usual cooperation and handling of flight factors he couldn't with the nonexistant other five pilots.


	11. Explanations

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: Why doesn't it say Police Public Call Box? Because the word 'Police' doesn't exist in the language (such as it is) that I've been imagining. They use the term 'guard' where we'd use 'police'. Therefore, when the TARDIS translates the exterior for the . . . hem . . . Galfrians, it says Guard. Okay? Okay.

* * *

><p>Marit was already wrong-footed by discovering that Natanerialon was head blind, and as she walked into the complex it quickly became clear that this was not the haven the institutes were popularly depicted as being. It was a cold, frightening place, and within minutes the descriptions of how the children were treated brought two disturbing thoughts to mind.<p>

The first was that the surroundings and lack of emotional care would equally explain the head blind tendency to being overly tactile and overtly hostile, and the other was that it made her think of Jon . . . _Theta_ she reminded herself. It reminded her of the sterile childhood she'd seen hidden in the few memories he'd been able to pull up since she and the Professor had adopted him.

Torana and Farah looked equally as disturbed by the whole situation. "I don't understand," Torana said, frustrated and confused. "Why would anyone choose to do this? It's almost custom-designed to make everyone here hostile and –"

"It's designed to make sure no one here thinks they deserve or even _can_ live on the outside," Natanerialon said from where he'd been tailing them. "They don't even know that the outside is any different than in here." He shuddered, adding, "If I hadn't known Rose isn't Galfrian, doesn't sense the Web, I would probably have rioted with everyone else to get her out. They left her in isolation to try to break her. I can't . . . once was more than enough," he said.

"Isolation?" Torana looked at him, horrified. "Tell me that it isn't a deprivation room. They're not taking the head blind and placing them into a telepathic deprivation room!"

The young woman who'd been with Theta's Rose and Natanerialon spoke up. "They put me in there when they sent Mavontarinaven away. We'd started bonding," she looked at them pleadingly. "He'd said he was sure we had a weak bond and he'd thought of a way he might make it stronger and then they found out and put me in there and I . . . it hurt . . ." she was crying through the words and Marit felt sick.

"Rivan," Natanerialon said gently. He looked thoughtful a moment, then took her hand, frowning. "Rivanaterintilar," he said.

Her head came up and she gave a small shudder, then relaxed. "What did . . . how?"

"Just something Rose did for me when I got out of Isolation," he said. "Her people aren't telepaths at all, so instead they use a lot of physical contact. The amplification of telepathy through touch means that you can effect a connection, it just requires contact to make it happen. I hadn't . . . it opens possibilities if we allow for the head blind to have certain liberties allowed . . ." he trailed off at her confused look. "Touching makes bonds and normal contact possible," he told her, simplifying for her limited vocabulary.

Marit shook her head. "What I don't understand is how it is that we came to believe these things when everything here seems to directly contradict all the supposed evidence we've based our studies on."

Her former student looked just as baffled. "I can't begin to understand how there came to be deprivation rooms for people who are already bond-deprived. None of this makes any sense."

A strange noise came from behind them, a little like an engine, a little like a fan and a little like a badly tuned synthesiser. As they all watched the air rippled, then seemed to coalesce into a boxy shape that faded into existence. It was blue with two windows on the front, a little light atop it and with writing that seemed in an alien language for a moment, but so quickly resolved that it seemed to have been a facet of the strange materialisation. The writing on the door was too small to be seen from a distance, but above the doors it read, 'GUARDS' PUBLIC CALL BOX'.

"What in anti-time is that thing?" Torana said, gaping.

No one answered, because they all, like Marit, had no idea. The doors swung open and Theta popped out, followed by Rose, who was dressed in new clothes. Her trousers were oddly tight and blue, while her top was a pale pink and had some sort of complex symbol atop it, and the words, 'Keep calm and drink tea,' on the bottom.

"Hello, Marit," Theta said as he strode forward. And there really was no other word for what he was doing than striding. His coat billowed behind him, making him cut an imposing figure.

As baffled as she was by this whole situation, Marit found herself taking out her upset on him. "And where have you been? After all the trouble you went to in order to throw the entire system here into chaos I'd have thought you'd stay here to deal with the aftermath."

Rose snorted. "Chaos he does well, cleanup and order? Not so much."

"Rose!" he shot her a wounded look, then became serious again. "There's a lot more going on here than you know," he said. "I've just found out rather a lot. Including how and why the so-called Transportation happened."

"What?" _What?_ Chorused several voices and minds at once. _Theta, what are you going on about?_ She asked.

He winced. "Please, don't call me that. I always hated it. It's why I chose my name after leaving the Academy."

"Chose?" Marit was flummoxed enough that it actually took her a moment to realise what he meant. "What did you choose?"

For a moment she felt a sense of remembered trepidation, as though he was recalling something, most likely the first time he'd said his new name to his old friends and family. "The Doctor," Rose answered for him. "He's the Doctor." She took his hand, and Marit began to look her over more closely. She had a vague sense Rose might be the thing that had kept Theta – The Doctor, she had to remember this properly, from falling apart.

Torana let out a snort of laughter. "No wonder you kept being amused on hearing people called 'doctor'."

He smiled faintly. "Be that as it may, I've found the answers to a lot of questions in the last hour and we need to talk to someone important, because there are some significant gaps in your history that need to be filled in."

"The last hour?" Natanerialon asked. "But you've been gone twenty minutes, if that."

At that, Marit's newly adopted son grinned. "I've got a time machine." He gestured at the blue thing he'd stepped out of.

Rose shot him a dark look. "The minute we left, yeah? I suppose I should be grateful you didn't miss by a year again."

"That's neither here nor there," said the Doctor, beginning to speak overtop of the end of her sentence, clearly trying to stop her from saying more. Marit resolved to pin the girl down and find out whatever it was that the newest member of her family didn't want her to know. He continued, saying, "So what we need to do is get in contact with that Council representative, Varenterlarktior, wasn't it?"

"It is," came a voice from behind them, and they all turned to see their lanky representative and the Professor coming up behind them. "You seem to have some information beyond the basics that the head blind have been sadly abused by our system," said the tall, sharp-eyed woman.

Marit sighed as the Professor joined her, briefly resting a hand on her arm and conveying a warm sense of comfort, easing the stress she'd been under since they'd all felt the Doctor's shock slamming down the familial bond, followed by his shutting them out. And then the sensation they'd all felt echoing down the bond of his mind working at dizzying speeds and the dark rage seething under it all had left her shaking and clinging to her anger at him for ignoring them and running off into trouble because it kept her from feeling overwhelmed by the force of his personality and the darkness bubbling inside him.

The Doctor nodded. "If you all wouldn't mind, I think this would be best explained in the TARDIS," he said, gesturing at his weird, wooden-looking box. Rose immediately turned around and walked in, followed by the Doctor. Natanerialon seemed to pause a moment, then he followed, with Rivanaterintilar close on his heels. Farah's eyes narrowed and she chased after. _Mother! You have to see this!_

Marit glanced at the Professor and he told her, _He has no ill intentions, you know this._

She sighed. _I know, but I suppose I'm just realising exactly how little we've seen of him after all._

There was nothing for it, and even as the Doctor asked, _Are you two coming or not?_ she took a breath to steady herself and walked in to discover, "Pythia! It's . . . bigger on the inside." Just as she finished she caught the Doctor mouthing the words along with her. Marit shot him a dark look and aimed a mental whack at him.

"He loves that part," Rose said. "Why don't you start explaining," she told the Doctor, "And try not to be all . . ." she waved a hand.

"Rude?" he offered as a suggestion.

She rolled her eyes. "Snooty like you used to be when you were calling everyone a stupid ape."

"Ah," he said. Underneath his apparent cheer was a slight pang when she said that. Then the emotion was expertly buried and he turned around, hitting a few buttons and switches on the control panel before him. "Let's start at the beginning, shall we?" He turned a screen around so that everyone could see it. The image was of a planet, from orbit. Or at least, that was what Marit surmised from having seen the images taken from satellites of New Galfry. "This," declared the Doctor, "Is Gallifrey. Or to you, Old Galfry."

There were sharp inhalations all around the room. Even Rivanaterintilar, who had clearly had virtually no education knew of the Transportation and their origins. "Old Galfry?" echoed Councillor Varenterlarktior.

"Yes," he said, sounding clinical and feeling so . . . bereft. Empty and anguished. He continued, looking entirely as though it meant nothing to him. "I'm from Gallifrey – Old Galfry," he corrected. "For terminological consistency," he told them.

"Termina-what?" asked Rose.

He smiled at her. "Using the same words to describe something as most other people so that everyone knows what I'm talking about and don't get confused."

Rivanaterintilar and Rose's faces cleared. "Just keep in mind not all of us are geniuses," Rose told him. "Or have fancy-pants education. I didn't even get my A-Levels." If she hadn't been able to feel the Doctor through the bond, Marit would have missed the tiny interchange between the pair, the Doctor picking up on a minute visual head bob in Rivanaterintilar's direction from Rose, his tiny nod of understanding that he needed to adapt to the poor girl's complete lack of schooling. The connection they shared, without even a hint of telepathy, made Marit all the more ashamed of having just accepted the assumptions made about the head blind. She also put aside for later inquiry the question as to what, exactly, A-Levels were. Schooling of some level, clearly, but what it was exactly was just another question to add to the ones rapidly piling up in her mind.

"Right," said the Doctor, shaking Marit out of her thoughts. "Now, at the time on Old Galfry that I'm from, we had access to a large amount of time-related technology. A time-and-spaceship is only one of those things. He turned towards Rose and Rivanaterintilar as he continued. "Now you already have time lock technology here, that is, the ability to freeze something in time and effectively remove it from the timestream. One of our . . . people," a shudder of violent hatred, anger and disgust rippled through the Doctor as he spoke, though once more, if she hadn't had a parent bond to him Marit wouldn't have caught it. "He decided he wanted to perform . . . research. By my time, everyone was bioengineered for the greatest intellect, telepathy and time sense possible. Rassilon wanted to see the genomes of unmodified Galfrians. So, he did something highly distasteful and illegal and arranged to go back in time to before even the dark times and effected the removal of several cities from Old Galfry, then placed them in a time lock."

It was as far buried as he could make it, but Marit felt, and she knew the Professor and Farah did as well, the anger, grief, hatred and disgust swirling inside the Doctor. Along with that was terror. Something was very, very wrong here. It was wrong in a way that made every negative feeling imaginable swell inside the ancient man that Marti had welcomed into her family.

Councillor Varenterlarktior spoke then. "You mean to say the Transportation was a . . . a science experiment?" she sounded outraged.

"More than that," the Doctor told her. "The mistreatment of the so-called head blind is a result of Rassilon's manipulations. He was brilliant," he said ruefully. "One of the greatest minds we ever produced. He was just . . . also mad. I wish I'd noticed sooner," he added hollowly.

Rose narrowed her eyes at him. "It wasn't your fault," she told him firmly. "You couldn't have known he'd be like that."

"Was?" inquired Natanerialon. "From the way you're talking, this Rassilon is dead."

"There was a war," replied the Doctor bluntly. The flatness of his tone belied the raging guilt. "Gallifrey, Old Galfry, was destroyed. There were no survivors. Except me."

There it was. Torana caught her eye and Marit nodded to her. This was at least one of the primary sources of the pain and darkness that still raged inside the poor man.

The Doctor clapped his hands, his false front of cheer coming back into place. "So!" he declared. "Rassilon manipulated people into . . . hmm . . . shall we say removing those he deemed unworthy from the gene pool. He wanted pure stock, but he also wanted no supposedly inferior genetics. So he dropped a few words in the appropriate ears and Bob's-your-uncle, ridiculous caste system." He frowned. "Bob's-your-uncle? Never going to say that again."

"How do you know that?" the Professor asked. "If you intend to bring proof to anyone of this, you're going to have to provide more than the statement that you're from Old Galfry and knew this Rassilon. Anyone could say that."

"Which is why I've brought you here," he said cheerfully, and ushered them outside. Marit blinked in surprise as they found themselves on the Academy campus, across from the mosaic of the founding faculty.

The Doctor walked up to the images on the wall and pointed at one. "Meet Rassilon, first president of Old Galfry, one of the two who created the Untempered Schism and the founder of modern Gallifreyan society."

"Rassatermudilon?" Natanerialon asked, sounding stunned. "The man who founded the Academies did this?"

The Doctor gave a wry grin as he said, "Oh, he did more than that. He just couldn't keep from a little more self-aggrandisement and arranged for his data storage to be turned into this mosaic." He pointed to the tiles. "Take a close look and you'll see the circuitry. I didn't even realise until Rose noticed."

Only Natanerialon chose to peer at the tiles. Marit knew she wouldn't know an alien data storage device from a hole in the wall and neither would Farah or the Professor. Farah was a veterinarian and the Professor taught literature at the Academy. "This is incredible," murmured Natanerialon.

Shrugging, the Doctor said, "I suppose, by comparison with the extant forms of storage here, but it's rather out of date by my standards. That said, most of what's in there is complete genomes, statistics and raw data."

The councillor spoke then. "Would you be willing to provide telepathically verified testimony to this effect?" she asked. "I've long argued that the treatment of the head blind was appalling, but if you can offer proof that this was a deliberate conspiracy then I have a real chance at effecting change in the policies regarding them, and to do it quickly for once."

Nodding, he said, "But give me just a moment here." Leading the way back into his ship-in-a-blue-wood-box, the Doctor strode back to the strange control centre. He began pressing buttons and switches, and then Marit felt it. Skirting the edge of her consciousness was a telepathic signature unlike any she'd ever felt before. She closed her eyes in concentration, touching it, and found herself in contact with a mind that was vast and incomprehensible. As she carefully explored her contact with this strange mind, first the Professor, then Farah joined her.

_Hello?_ She sent.

A sense of warmth and welcome washed over her. Affection and encouragement were predominant, but there was a sense of vague urgency as images of the Doctor, with faces she didn't know but were somehow still him, losing friends and finally watching with a stony facial expression as a whole planet exploded in front of him. A pervasive sense of loneliness echoed through it all, peaking in times after the planetary explosion.

The loneliness abated significantly with the appearance of Rose in those images, and now seemed mostly gone as she saw the faces of her family and herself. Lastly there was the sense of a query. Of this mind wanting to be sure she had understood the message.

She was startled out of her rapport by the Doctor's voice. "Sneaking around behind my back are you?"

Opening her eyes, Marit saw him talking to the ceiling.

"Who are you talking to?" Torana asked suspiciously.

"The TARDIS," the Doctor replied as though it were obvious. Marit felt a pulse of affection for the Doctor from the mind. "She's telepathic you know."

"No they don't know you prawn," Rose said in clear exasperation. "That's why they're looking at you like you're madder than usual, yeah?"

Marit's jaw dropped. "That . . . that presence is your . . . this ship?" She gestured vaguely around the golden-hued coral walls, the weirdly scattershot-looking console and the entirely incongruous wooden object by the door that was apparently a coat rack if the fact that there was a coat hanging from it was any indication. You never did know with the Doctor.

There was an affectionate smile on Rose's face as she said, "Yeah, should be. She likes you."

Marit received another selection of images and feelings. _Sister/self/Bad Wolf_ Rose staring into a swirl of golden light that was like that Untempered Schism the Doctor had been forced to see when he was a child, but this wasn't a tearing sense of burning and a need to run, it was a feeling of unity, love and a desire to protect that was fierce like the native wolflike predators that now lived at the dark and alien corners of the Arcalian Woods.

"I thought you said you weren't telepathic?" Natanerialon asked, eyes narrowed at her.

Rose shrugged. "We've had a connection ever since I did something a bit mad to save this one." She jerked her head in the Doctor's direction.

"You mean ever since you looked into her heart and absorbed all of time and space," the Doctor said, remembered terror echoing in his mind. "You never mentioned a residual connection."

"I didn't really think I had to," Rose said. "S'not like she'd ever do anything dangerous to me."

Farah added, "She just told us she thinks of Rose like a sort of sister."

The Doctor shot a squinty-eyed look at the blue-green light humming in the middle of the console. "We will be having words," he told it.

Marit got the impression of amusement and someone sticking their tongue out and making faces. "That's made an impression," her bondmate told their adopted son with mild amusement.

"Annnnnnnnnyhow!" the Doctor declared in a clear attempt to change the subject. He whipped over to a little niche and pulled out a data pad. "This should have the summarised notes Rassilon made on his project and the efforts he'd put into it." He plopped the pad into Varenterlarktior's hands. "So, how quickly can we get the Council into session? No time like the present, yes?"

Their council member smiled and said, "It shouldn't take more than a few hours, given the situation at the Lakeview City institute."

"Why don't you drop us back there before you take . . . erm . . . sorry, I'm terrible with names," Rose said to Varenterlarktior apologetically. "Doctor? Can you drop us back there? I'd think we'd better make sure people know what's going on."

"True," the Doctor mused. He seemed about to say more when Rose spoke again.

"Nat," she said. "You should go with the Doctor. I mean, everyone's all shocked when they find out about you, which means you probably act, well, normal. And you're smart."

The Doctor nodded. "Someone to speak on behalf of the so-called head blind. Someone intelligent that they can't deny has no need to be kept away from society."

Farah spoke up. "You'd be fantastic at it, Natanerialon." She smiled at the young man she'd been friends with for years. Then she turned to Marit. "Mum, you should come. You're a reputable psychological analyst, so you'd be able to support the idea that he's not a . . . problem." She groped a moment for the word, seeming to pick it as an imperfect choice, but better than whatever she'd had in mind.

Councillor Varenterlarktior shook her head. "Not his bonded family," she said firmly.

Torana heaved a sigh. "I'm his personal psychological analyst," she told the councillor. "Dr. Toranamopandar. I suppose I'll have to be the one to present that sort of evidence."

"Right," Rose said. "Then I think we'll try to get into the files here. See if we can't find out some stuff, like where Rivan's . . . erm . . . future bondmate is from and such. Peoples' families, yeah? They'll want to know, most likely."

With these plans being made, Marit shared a thought with the Professor, who agreed to her idea, and said, "I'll come with you, then. You're rarely tactful, Doctor. Marit's staying with Rose and she'll get started on more formal evaluations of the people at the institute."

The Doctor looked like he would have liked to be insulted at the statement, but Rose shot him an amused look which seemed to bring a halt to any objections he may have had.

When they landed with a juddering thump, the institute was outside the doors. Marit hastily stepped out, followed quickly by a nervous-looking Rivanaterintilar. Rose was following when she was stopped in the door by the Doctor. "Be careful," he told her firmly. Marit found herself sharing a very uncomfortable glance with Rivanaterintilar as he pulled Rose into an incredibly intimate embrace for a public space like that. "Don't go wandering about."

"You're the one who wandered off this time," Rose told him when they pulled apart. "I didn't go anywhere, except to follow and find you."

He grinned at her. "Just don't be all jeopardy friendly until I'm free to rescue you again," he said. Then he hurried inside.


	12. An Idea or Two

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: So, we finally have begun to hit the 'shippyness. If you don't like that, you might want to consider bailing by the end of the next chapter, because this is where the plot begins to evaporate in favour of mindless dribbling about Ten and Rose.

* * *

><p>Rose sighed and turned to where Marit and Rivan were both waiting. "Do you really need to act like that in <em>public<em>?" asked the Doctor's new adopted mother.

"What do you mean?" Rose asked. Then it hit her. Again. "Sorry. I keep forgetting about the telepath thing and all. I know you lot find that sort of physical contact really intimate, but to me it's just a hug, yeah? Anyhow, the Doctor's been 'round Earth so much he's kind of gone native a bit. He knows it doesn't mean much. To us, anyhow."

Marit shot Rose a look the human couldn't interpret, then said, "That's ridiculous. He's smitten with you."

"Did you get a feeling about that through that bond of yours?" Rose asked curiously. Did he feel that way? Because if he did they were going to be having a long talk about mixed messages and normal human interactions.

That didn't bag her the confirmation she wanted at all. "Not exactly," hedged the other woman. "But you're very important, and that embrace of yours wasn't nothing."

"I hug my mate Shareen like that all the time," Rose replied a little sharply. "Not to mention my mum, my friend Mickey, Keisha and my gran. I know it's hard sometimes to look at people acting totally different from how you're used to, but it's just not that intimate, yeah?"

Rivan interrupted. "That looks so romantic," she said wistfully. "I can't see how you could say he doesn't think of you like that."

"If you'd seen how hard he works at not actually telling me things like that you wouldn't wonder," she told them. Then she changed the subject. "Rivan, why don't we collect one of the guard types and see if we can't find out some way to contact your fiancé." She wasn't completely sure that was the right word, but boyfriend sounded like it might be trite just then.

It didn't take long at all to find the information, and Rose watched as Rivan curled up with a video phone, staring avidly at a somewhat ill-looking man, who seemed to be trying to pack while not taking his eyes off her.

Marit had commandeered the office next door and was interviewing everyone one at a time, scribbling notes all over the files and making distressed noises over them. Once Rivan had hung up, Mavontarinaven having told her he was on his way there, she joined Marit in the office, and Rose smiled as Rivan took to the role of secretary with ease. Rose left them to begin sorting through the files in the Institute's archives, trying to find peoples' families and just seeing if anything caught her eye as important.

She wasn't sure how much time had passed when Marit arrived at the dank room in the basement, surprising her by appearing directly in front of her without warning. "Oh! You startled me," she said to the other woman. "Could you knock next time?" she asked. Then realising that was a lot rude, "Sorry. I think the Doctor's wearing off on me."

The white-haired woman shook her head. "I'm sorry. I had forgotten you're not . . . not telepathic." The pause suggested she'd been thinking of saying something like, 'normal', but had realised how terrible that would sound and changed midsentence. "I needed a break from so many people with so many problems that could have been avoided if they'd been treated decently."

Rose smiled. "I get that. The others seemed to be handling themselves fine without me, so I figured I'd see what we could find out about people's families and such."

"I also wanted to talk to you about the Doctor," Marit said slowly. "There's just so much I don't know, and he's . . . I've bonded to him as a son, you see. But there's so much that he hides," she told Rose. "I suppose I wanted to know what you could tell me."

That was . . . "I'm not really sure what you want me to tell you," Rose answered hesitantly. "I mean, if he's got secrets he's told me, they're not things I should be telling you, yeah?"

"Understandable," Marit nodded as she spoke, then sighed. "Tell me how you met, then? I'd like to get something of a better idea of who he is when he remembers things."

Rose frowned, then shrugged. "Well, he didn't have this body when we first met for starters, and-"

"What?" The tone of voice was exactly the same one Rose had heard from her mum and Mickey back when she'd tried to explain to them about the Doctor up and changing from a bloke from up north with gorgeous blue eyes, short hair and big ears into a bloke from London with chocolaty brown eyes, normal ears and big hair.

"Erm . . . you don't get new bodies 'round here whenever you're about to die?" she hesitantly asked.

Marit's eyes were wide and stunned. "No," she said. "He . . . he gets a new body when he's dying?"

"Yeah." Rose heard her voice crack as she remember losing the first one. "It's a bit . . . shocking."

_You were fantastic. And so was I._

The hiss of surprise from across the room snapped Rose's attention back to Marit. "You alright?"

"I heard that," Marit told her. "For someone who claims not to be telepathic, you do think loudly at times. Of course, that was also a . . . strong memory."

"Loudly?" Rose asked. "You weren't . . . looking, were you?"

Marit immediately answered, almost overtop what Rose was asking. "Oh, no! I'd never do that. That's incredibly rude. You just . . . the memory was so strong that it practically flung itself out of your mind." Her eyes went unfocused a moment. She looked back up quickly though. "Sorry. Habit. It was just so strong, and it's habit as a psychological analyst for me to examine something that's so personally influential when it comes up." Considering further a moment she added, "That was a very different man than the one I know."

Rose nodded. "He looked totally different. Short, dark hair, big ears, blue eyes, totally different accent, he dressed differently too. But then things happened, and I don't remember everything about it, but somehow he was dying." She snorted. "He gave this big rambling speech talking about Barcelona, the planet not the city, dogs with no noses, having no head, and somewhere in that he said that Time Lords, his people, they had a trick where, when they were dying they could change every cell in their bodies. Then he said I was fantastic and he was too, then he just sort of exploded. Next thing I know, there's a totally different bloke claiming to be the Doctor in front of me."

"So, is this a thing that he's done . . . more than once?" Marit asked slowly, as though thinking of something.

"I think," Rose told her. "I'm not sure, but he's said things and Sarah Jane said things, so I think he's done it a few times. More than three, at least," she said.

"Sarah Jane?"

Even with Rose's determined avoidance of telling Marit anything she thought might be a secret, there was still a lot to tell the woman, and when Marit decided she'd had enough of a break and went back to work at evaluating the people incarcerated in the Institute, they'd agreed to exchange more stories. Marit also promised to tell Rose what the Doctor had got up to in her absence.

Unfortunately, despite the large numbers of files kept on the residents, there wasn't much in the files and databanks at the Institute on their origins. Rose looked through everything and found nothing in the end that she could use, although she did catch the multiple times people had been tossed into Isolation and made a mental note to herself to remind Marit to look through the files for things like that which could have caused psychological damage.

She was just packing it in for the day when a lot of ruckus outside got her attention. By the time she got out there, Rivan and her fiancé were inches from each other, hands clasped tightly, and Rose could only assume it was the Gallifreyan version of PDA. Marit was watching, and Rose came over and asked her, "Did I miss anything, or was it pretty much like in a romance?"

Marit glanced over at her with an amused smile. "Pretty much just a grand romance. The running across the yard, starry-eyed looks and romantic embrace and everything." She tilted her head. "And there is definitely a bond between them. Not very strong," she said slowly, "But it's definitely there. Pythia, I could just . . . how did we not notice that there were no proper studies done?" By the end of the question she was angry.

"The Doctor said it was a plot of some sort," Rose reminded her. "The important thing is that everyone knows now."

Mavontarinaven came over, towing Rivan, both of them clearly unwilling to let go. He looked anxious. "Do you think it would be much trouble for everyone if Rivan and I left?" he asked. "Only, I promised her we'd go out to see the Cliffs of Preydone as soon as we could and we can now."

Rivan smiled. "I can wait if we need to, for some sort of . . . of . . ." she looked over at Mavontarinaven, "What's the word you used?"

"Administrative," he told her. "An administrative reason. Something to do with the people in charge needing to keep things in a proper sort of order to make sure it's easier to keep track."

Marit looked them up and down, then said, "Do you have a mobile? Because if you just make sure to check that for messages so we can find you if we find Rivan's birth family, I really don't see why you both can't take a bit to strengthen your bond."

"Thank you," Mavontarinaven said. His voice cracked on the word, then the pair were almost racing out the main entrance, past the former guards and former inmates who were wandering in and out the main compound, the former inmates marvelling at the small forested area outside the walls, the distance to the horizon and a pond that was only a five minute walk away, but was more naturally situated water than any of them had ever seen.

Rose watched them go, smiling, then asked curiously, "What are the Cliffs of Preydone?" Marit turned to her and she hastily added, "I get that they're cliffs, but are they at the ocean? A ravine? Are they a big tourist spot or something?"

The Doctor's newly adopted mum (what a strange thought, the Doctor, with a mum) grinned. "They're gorgeous. They're westward facing and sunsets at them are famous. They're just as beautiful during the day too, though. The water is gold and the islands look like red jewels with the grass on them almost glowing. The Professor and I took our honeymoon there. Not quite a vacation in the tropics, we didn't have the funds for that, but it was beautiful."

"Sounds it," Rose said. "Still gets me a little weird when people talk about oceans that aren't the right colour, but it does sound gorgeous."

Marit tilted her head interestedly as she asked, "The right colour?"

"Well, where I'm from," Rose explained, "Our sky's blue, so the water's blue. Grass is green as well. See what I mean about things sounding a bit off when someone talks about them being the wrong colours?"

"I do see," Marit said. "Blue? Sounds . . . strange."

"Maybe you can talk the Doctor into taking you on a trip to Earth with us," Rose suggested. "He's spent a lot of time there, you might find some of those answers about him you're looking for from that."

Looking contemplative, Marit said slowly, "I just might do that."


	13. Representation

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: To Curry, who has been leaving me not-signed-in reviews, I suspect you'll like this bit. Everyone else, I know I promised romantic dribble, but I have to work up to it. We're kind of in the middle of a crisis here, after all.

* * *

><p>In his various researches the Doctor had noted the location of the city which held the seat of government for this planet he was hard-pressed not to think of as Gallifrey II. He landed just outside the Council Halls, pausing for a moment to take in something that bore such a strong resemblance to the Panopticon in form and style the Doctor couldn't suppress the surge of memory.<p>

_Vaporisation without representation is against the constitution._

_Has the accused anything to say before sentence is pronounced?_

_Yes. Article Seventeen. . . . I offer myself as a candidate for the Presidency._

The Professor and Farah both shot him startled looks. He tried to ignore them and lock down that impossible bond a little more. He wasn't fast enough, clearly, and Farah said, "Vaporisation?"

"You know, it's really quite inconvenient having people wandering about back there," he said to her. "Shall we?" he asked Councillor Varenterlarktior, gesturing out the door.

His only warning that it was about to happen was the abortive motions, both telepathic and physical on the Professor's part to restrain his daughter. "You applied to be President to avoid being executed? Why were they executing you?"

"What?" chorused Natanerialon and Varenterlarktior.

Praying to a few deities he'd had occasion to wish existed, the Doctor replied. "I was set up. An old enemy took his revenge by making it look like I'd assassinated the last one. They weren't going to investigate, just execute me, so I did the only thing I could to get them all to hold off until I'd found out what was happening. It's not my favourite memory to dwell on," he added.

Only Farah didn't take the hint, but the Professor hushed her and they made their way into the building. Varenterlarktior led the way, marching into the Assembly with a sort of dramatic flair the Doctor couldn't help but appreciate. She murmured to him, "I wish I had my robes. I always did want to sweep in here in style." He just gave a smug little flip to his Janis Joplin coat in response. Eyes narrowed in false irritation over it nonetheless betrayed her amusement at his taunt. Yes, the Doctor definitely liked her.

She marched up to a podium at the head of the hall, but before she could speak, one of the other councillors stood and began talking down at her. "So, Varenterlarktior, what silly notion have you dragged us here to natter on about?"

"Firstly," she said crisply to him, "It's Councillor Varenterlarktior, Master Sopuristicallintad," a mutter of discontent rumbled through the room. "And second, I'm sure we've all seen the riots at the Institute for the Head Blind near Lakeview City."

"Yes, yes," grumbled another. "We've all seen the animals rattling their cages-"

The Doctor couldn't quite mask his fury, and it echoed into the Web locally. An uneasy shudder rippled over the councillors in their seats, and the high, angled ceilings with the dark green jadelike stone covering them all seemed darker and colder. He allowed himself to marvel at the terrifying notion that he was the strongest telepath amongst these remains of his own people, letting that concerning thought smooth away the bulk of his anger at the statement.

"Animals?" Varenterlarktior said. "Even if the head blind are all that you think they are, they are still people. Our sons and daughters, and to claim they are nothing more than animals is reprehensible. But I have evidence, a witness, and a psychological analyst willing to testify to both his sanity and the truth of what he has to say, that our head blind are victims of a corruption reaching all the way back to the Transportation."

Several councillors rolled their eyes, mutters of, "More drama. Fantastic," could be heard from all around, and Natanerialon suddenly stepped up behind her.

"When Councillor Varenterlarktior claimed the main bridge out to the Arcalian Islands was in need of fixing because of the failing infrastructure, she claimed it was going to cause deaths and calamity. You all called her alarmist then. When she claimed the basic educational standards for children in poorer sectors were too low, you all complained she was inventing problems. When she claimed former councillor Jerlankintropariot was corrupt you accused her of melodramatics." The young man was on a roll, the impassioned words pouring off his tongue. The Doctor was looking forward to when these poor fools discovered Natanerialon was telepathically stunted.

"Five people died and a hundred were injured when the bridge collapsed, cutting the islands off from the mainland. When the standardised comprehension tests were applied to schoolchildren everywhere the poor sectors consistently had abysmal scores. And I do believe the former councillor's delightful slide into ignominy was on the news for weeks on end only a few months ago. Every time she's claimed a dire state of affairs she's been right. Why should this be any different?" Natanerialon's eyes narrowed as he glared challengingly at the collection of old bats that would have been the equal of any such collection of legislators on the original Gallifrey.

While the younger man was clearly not as telepathically gifted as most, it was hardly a matter of difficulty to whisper into his mind, _Nicely done._

The other's shoulders jerked a little, and the Doctor just barely heard the carefully formed reply, _Thank you._

His short but pointed speech had silenced the grumbles however, and Varenterlarktior smiled. "Thank you Natanerialon. Doctor, if you wouldn't mind? You too, Dr. Toranamopandar."

The Doctor had dealt with legislative bodies before, had dealt with the Time Lord High Council, had been the President (for about thirty seconds, really) and had absolutely no fear as he sauntered down the aisle at the centre of the room to a small lectern and microphone. A squirrelly-looking young man held out a book and said, "Do you swear upon the Word of Time to speak truly and-"

"What?" he asked. It was like he'd been suddenly transmatted to a wonky Earth courtroom.

Dr. Toranamopandar hastily said, "He's not Pythian."

"Oh," the young man blinked. "But-"

"Just don't," she advised him. "However I, Dr. Toranamopandar, do swear to speak truly as I vouch for the mental acuity, mental clarity and veracity of this witness."

Curious, he asked, "No one's going to ask me to affirm? Not that it matters to me. If I don't believe in a higher power then there's little for me to fear, but nonetheless-"

He'd noticed she had a tendency to interrupt him when he was just getting to the interesting bits of his rambles. "That's exactly why we don't ask it."

"Ah."

Varenterlarktior cleared her throat pointedly, then said, "Now that we've got that out of the way, Dr. Toranamopandar, if you would?"

The Doctor frowned a moment as she stood, reaching for the points at his temples that most assisted in telepathic contact, then heard from the Professor, _She'll be in a light telepathic gestalt with you for the duration of your testimony to back up that you're both telling the truth and not having some sort of hallucinatory experience._

Clearly he'd been remiss in reading up on the local culture. He had a lot of ground to cover. This was logical and kinder than the Time Lord version where someone simply went in and took the memories straight out of your head. Of course, if bonds were something that had existed in his people until Rassilon's great revolution, then the risks of people accidentally getting caught up in each other's heads in bonds was quite great if you did what Dr. Toranamopandar was doing to him now.

"I have formed the connection," she informed the crowd in formal tones. "He is fully rational. Councillor Varenterlarktior, you may begin your inquiries."

"Good," the Councillor said. "Please state your name to the Council."

He grinned and threw every bit of the cocky persona he'd used on the old High Council back in the day into his words. "I'm the Doctor." After a moment, he decided why not and finished it up properly. "Of the Prydonian Chapter, graduate of the Academy as a Time Lord and former President of Gallifrey, which you all know as Old Galfry."

Murmurs swept the room and he felt a simultaneous spike of shock and irritation from Dr. Toranamopandar. "He's neither lying nor delusional," she informed them. He also wasn't quick enough to keep her from catching Tegan's incredulous question when he ran from the presidency when it was thrust on him.

_You mean you're deliberately choosing to go on the run from your own people in a rackety old TARDIS?_

_Why not? After all, that's how it all started._

Farah's mental presence was all incredulity that someone would run away from the presidency like that, while the Professor's mental eyeroll seemed to be right up there in the history of all exasperated facial expressions he'd been subjected to. Dr. Toranamopandar's irritation came out when she added, "His tenure was ended by his own wishes."

"Flavia really shouldn't have sprung that on me," he complained.

Varenterlarktior's lips twitched a moment in clear amusement before she got herself under control. "So, please tell the Council what you told me. With minimal digressions, if you would?" she added. The sangfroid and mild reproach could have matched the Brigadier at his best.

But this was a little too important for temporising and silliness, so he told them. He spoke of Gallifrey's history, of who Rassilon was and how he was brought back for the Time War. He spoke about the horrific end to the war and the time lock he'd placed on it all. He spoke of his discovery that Rassilon had been here and had broken one of the most important precepts of Gallifreyan society, to never time travel into Gallifrey's distant past. Speaking of the notes he'd found, masses of data hidden in the mosaic and how Rassilon had carefully detailed his manipulation of academics, practical psychology and legislators to ensure the separation of the telepathically weak from the rest to weed poor genes out of the population.

A careful nudging at Marit's mind, requesting her permission to borrow access to the other information, he began to carefully add the details of actions they had taken that would only guarantee that the people there would have become violent and angry.

But at that point, Dr. Toranamopandar pulled away and spoke. "I can certainly vouch for these clinical assessments, as I was there briefly right before this council session was called, and Dr. Maritejanisavindar who stayed there to continue assessments concurs with those conclusions. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, the Doctor was using their family bond to provide you with the information on this topic immediately."

"True that," the Doctor admitted. "Psychology's not really my interest."

"Family bond?" inquired one councillor. "How would you have a family bond with this Dr. . . ." He trailed off with an inquiring and apologetic look at Toranamopandar.

"Maritejanisavindar," she reminded him.

He nodded, then said, "Right. Maritejanisavindar. If you're from Old Galfry, how and why would you have a bond with anyone here?"

"I do believe that that is personal information that is not pertinent to this discussion, Councillor," the Doctor told him coolly. He certainly wasn't going to discuss something so incredibly personal. The question just reminded him all over again of the sound of billions of children screaming and then the aching and total silence. More used to the bonds by now, he was able to suppress the bulk of the feelings and keep them away from the rest of the family. It was his burden, not theirs.

Varenterlarktior took centre stage again. "The Doctor has provided me with this," she brandished the data pad he had given her. "It contains all the pertinent details of this Rassilon's plans for us, especially his notes on how he convinced the earliest Council members and Academy faculties to systematically abuse and disenfranchise the head blind."

Natanerialon spoke up again. "He was able to do it because this Rassilon is the same man as the Academy founder, Rassatermudilon."

More mutters of shock filled the room as one woman burst out, "Impossible!"

"Oh, not impossible," the Doctor said, smiling wryly. "Just . . . generally illegal."

"But he was the one to establish the Institutes and donated the funds for the first one from his own pocket," objected one.

A look of exasperation on his face, Natanerialon replied, "Of course he did. It allowed him to make sure to hand pick the employees, decide on the architectural designs and easily ensure that they were built like prisons."

Several of the councillors sat back, arrested looks on their faces. "In any event," The Doctor added, "I hardly think any of you think of cold prisons with ill-educated children and telepathic deprivation chambers when you think of these institutes."

Another councillor snorted. "Oh please. That's hardly the worst sort of punishment-"

The Doctor heard several sharp breaths of shock from Natanerialon, Toranamopandar and the Professor. Each of them having cause to know exactly how terrible it was to be forever cut off from the Web. It sparked something vengeful in him, something he'd thought he'd left behind with the Time War. Oh, his last body had been angry, had been willing to do terrible things at the sight of a Dalek, but this was the cold, dispassionate fury that had got him through the atrocities he'd had to commit to drive back those forces during the War. "Have you ever been severed from the Web?" he asked, darkly.

"Well, no, but that's hardly-"

"What about this?" and with a too-easy mental shove, he'd dropped the experience of being cut off from the Web into the councillor's mind. The smug face crumpled under the weight of silence. "Is this 'hardly the worst sort of punishment'?" he demanded.

The reverberations of shock down the Web reminded him to pull back. Still furious but back in control, he let go of the mind he'd briefly separated from all telepathic senses. Natanerialon, pale but determined, said, "Now imagine that emptiness, that nothing, impressed upon you for hours, for days even, with no bonds to sustain you, during or after. If it weren't for his bondmate, mistaken for one of us, I might have gone mad after it was done to me."

"What does that mean?" asked another woman. She was one of the few who had seemed to be listening to everything said, considering all the information, not just playing politics.

"It means, Councillor Pataresalundar, that this young man, Natanerialon, is one of those head blind," Varenterlarktior informed them. "As you can see, he is neither a savage nor an idiot."

Councillor Pataresalundar examined Natanerialon thoughtfully. "That alone is an interesting point," she said. "I do find it interesting that the visit I took to the Solitudes Institute didn't seem to have a single person as well spoken or, forgive me for saying, well-behaved as yourself."

He snorted. "That's because my parents managed to keep me from being taken when I was a child, so I was raised in a normal family, instead of in an isolating, antiseptic, authoritarian, unsympathetic prison, and unlike the children raised in those facilities I got to learn about more than the four walls of that prison." His lips compressed in anger a moment before he clarified, "The education they receive is abysmal. Children a hundred years ago received a better education than they do there."

Varenterlarktior turned her attention back to the wider audience. "Now that you've heard my verification of the evidence, I ask that we turn this session to an immediate discussion of how to ameliorate the circumstances of the head blind in the short term, and form a committee to discuss a longer term solution to the problems inherent in reintegration."

_And now it's time to get out before I get roped into being stuck here in one place with nothing but dull legislation to entertain me._ The Doctor thought and began to quietly sneak across the floor to get away before someone roped him into helping.

_You're simply a troublemaker at heart, aren't you?_ the Professor asked, shaking his head as the Doctor passed him at speed.

Just as they both reached the door, Councillor Pataresalundar said, "Natanerialon, I do believe that you would be a valuable participant in this discussion, both as a former inhabitant of the institute that sparked our current situation, and as a reasonably integrated member of society."

"I . . ." he paused, looking around, concerned, when Farah stepped up to him with a grin.

"You absolutely would be," she said. "I always knew you were more than you pretended."

_I'm staying to back him up,_ she told her father and adopted brother. _I'll see you later._


	14. His Stories

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: This was originally going to be a separate story, this part we're starting at here, but I'd reached a stage where there was so much written I just decided to keep going straight through. To everyone favouriting and leaving reviews, thank you. Especially the people favouriting, since I haven't thanked you all yet.

* * *

><p>Events moved rapidly, and the Doctor, despite his best efforts to be left out of legislative issues, found himself often on call to make suggestions regarding the telepathic training and help for those with psychic limitations. He much preferred calls to universities to fill in gaps in their historical records regarding the causes of the Transportation, providing Rassilon's notes to geneticists, biologists, psychological analysts, sociologists, historians, doctors and assorted other academicians.<p>

It was Rose who provided the Doctor the impetus to take on a project that seemed to fill him with a sort of bubbling joy whenever he was involved in it. They were at dinner, the whole family, Verce and his wife, Farah and the children unabashedly staring at the alien young woman in their midst, and the Doctor enthusiastically prodding Rose to try all his favourites and her clearly humouring him, and Marit decided to rescue the poor girl. "So, Rose, why don't you tell us something about yourself?" She may also have been determined to learn a little more about the young woman the Doctor clearly wanted as a bondmate, even if he was heartily denying it to the point the girl was utterly confused by the conflicting signals he was giving her.

"Oh, I'm not that interesting," she denied. "My mum's a hairdresser and we live in estate housing in London. That's the biggest city in the U.K., my home country," she said. "I used to work in a clothes shop until he," she jerked her head to indicate the Doctor, "blew it up."

"He blew up a shop?" Galen asked with little boy fascination.

The Doctor looked indignant. "It was packed with mannequins trying to kill you," he exclaimed. "I saved your life!"

Rose patted his hand affectionately. "You did, and then I had to point out that the London Eye's a big circular metal thing." She turned to the rest of the table. "It's a ride, yeah? Big metal circle about a hundred and thirty metres high."

"A diametre of one hundred and thirty-five metres," the Doctor cut in, "It rotates at point nine kilometres per hour, or to be relatively accurate to local terms . . ." he slowed at Rose's look. "Half a Galfrian kilometre . . . in twenty-five point four . . . five two . . . Galfrian minutes." He stumbled to a halt as Rose continued to just look at him.*

She sighed. "I was more going for the fact that you missed that it was there and all," she told him with an affectionate smile. "I don't think they need the London trivia."

"What about your dad?" Ana asked innocently. Everyone felt the sudden curious blankness from the Doctor's part of the bond that these days bespoke him hiding a distressing emotion from them.

Rose's glance at the Doctor was unreadable as she answered, "He died when I was a baby. It's just Mum and me."

"And a vicious creature she is," the Doctor said, clearly trying to change the conversation to a more lighthearted direction.

"I seem to remember someone telling her that he'd employed me as his 'companion'," she said, bringing her fingers into the air in pairs and bending the index and middle twice in time with her speech. The Doctor quickly sent them the explanation of the gesture, that it indicated quotation marks.

It took a half second for the adults at the table to understand the implication, then Verce and his wife, Farah and the Professor were all sniggering, much to the confusion of the children, and Marit felt eminently in sympathy with Rose's poor mother. "She slapped me!" the Doctor protested.

"You'd earned it," Marit told him.

"You told her to shut up when she was just trying to help. You know, right after you'd regenerated," Rose continued.

His jaw dropped and he stared at her looking vaguely wounded. It was all in play, Marit could feel. "You mean when my brain was imploding and she wouldn't stop blathering on about soup and sandwiches?"

Rose shook her head. "You mean when you had the time to take the mick about Howard's fruit?"

The Doctor gave an exasperated sigh. "The man keeps fruit in his pyjamas, Rose. How can anyone not comment on that?"

"This from the man who keeps bananas and God knows what-all else in his bigger-on-the-inside pockets," she replied.

"She makes a good point," Verce said with a grin. "You do have some unbelievable detritus in those pockets of yours."

Ana and Galen both perked up. "What's a banana?" Galen asked.

Digging in those pockets of his, the doctor pulled out two bananas, peeling them and handing them to the children. "Some of the best fruit ever created in this galaxy," he started, then paused even as the pair munched curiously on the fruit. His hand went into a pocket, and a moment later he pulled out a pear. He shot a fulminating look at Rose, who looked away with an amused and clearly false look of innocence on her face. "This," he said darkly, "is a pear, and one of the most vile fruity creations of your home planet. What is it doing in my pocket, Rose Tyler?"

"I told you before," she said. "This is simply aversion therapy, and when you get over your weird fear of pears you'll thank me."

Curiously, Farah reached past Rose and plucked the pear from the Doctor's hand. She bit into the fruit and said, "It's unusual, but really quite pleasant."

Rose shamelessly stuck a hand into the Doctor's pocket closest to her, up to her elbow, and pulled out another two. "Have another then," she said with a grin. She promptly started eating one of them, passing the other over. The Doctor sputtered and began digging through his pockets, mutter balefully under his breath about vile fruits. "That reminds me," Rose said. "You've got a whole garden in the TARDIS, Doctor, with stuff that you said was native to Gallifrey. Maybe you should see if they can't start up a garden or something. I mean, everyone's been asking you about it, it might be nice for people to go to a greenhouse to see some things that didn't come over in the Transportation."

"Oh, yes," the Professor said eagerly. "There's literature and various historical documents that reference so much in the way of plants and animals that simply don't exist here, I have to assume none of them were from the geographical areas the Five Cities were from." He shook his head, "There's so much that's harder to parse when we don't know what arkytior look like, or flutterwings for that matter."

Farah added, "That would be wonderful. Just to have a better idea of the whole of the ecological web our animals came from would be so wonderful. It's so much harder to do taxonomical studies when we have no fossil records."

"I could," the Doctor said softly. Joy began rippling through the bond with the family. "The TARDIS wouldn't be the last of Gallifrey." He bolted out the door, clearly heading for the ship.

Rose rolled her eyes. "He's not very good at sitting all the way through meals," she said. "He's got the attention span of a three-year-old on a sugar high."

Pleading from Farah and her bondmate made Marit roll her own eyes. She looked between them both, saying, "Yes, go on and help him."

Then Ana and Galen were pleading and the whole family moved into the ship, which gave a welcoming hum, directing Farah and the Professor after the Doctor. Rose turned to the children. "Why don't we head to the library? I bet there's some books there you've never seen. You might find something interesting."

Ana and Galen were introduced to children's books from Rose's home planet, the Professor joining them after a while to enjoy these works from an alien species. Marit began to plumb the library herself, intrigued at several interesting tomes on human psychology, and after that dinner they began meeting daily on the TARDIS, while the Doctor began the process of creating a garden, sanctuary and reference centre of Old Galfrian culture and ecology.

It was another month, and then Rose spoke up finally. "Doctor, I know you've got a lot that you want to be doing here, and I'm not saying I want to leave permanently, but could you drop me home for a while? Mum's been calling more and more and I'd like to see her, yeah?"

The Doctor sighed. "If you must," he said, sounding put-upon.

"And you're not going to take me back after months and months," Rose added. "The date Mum last called, today, is September twenty-fifth. It'd better not be much after that."

"Only the twenty-fifth?" the Doctor picked up Rose's mobile and began scanning it with the thing he claimed was a screwdriver and was clearly nothing of the sort. "But it's been far longer than that!"

Rose shrugged. "The TARDIS says she's been slowing down our timeline relative to Mum's so she wouldn't worry."

"Mm-hmm?" he murmured, eyes going distant as he consulted with the ship. "She's playing favourites," he told Rose faux-darkly, his emotions sparkling and happy that his ship liked his not-exactly-a-bondmate so well.

"So we're going?" she asked.

Before he could reply, Marit took the chance and said, "Actually, Rose said something about how much time you've spent on . . . Earth was it?" she sent an inquiring look at Rose, who nodded. "Right. I suppose I was a little interested in this planet you've adopted."

"You could take her to meet Sarah Jane," Rose suggested. The look of mischief on her face told Marit there was more to the suggestion than just throwing out the name of a friend.

The Doctor's wide-eyed mild panic at the thought proved Marit's guess correct. "There's no need for that," he said hastily. "I'm sure I could find someone else to introduce Marit and the Professor to . . . maybe not. No, probably best if they don't talk to –"

"Anyone who might have the really good stories about you?" Rose inquired. "Sarah Jane told me all about when you regenerated and couldn't make up your mind about whether or not to be a berk and leave them to deal with the robot."

"Ah . . . I'd just regenerated you know," the Doctor told her. "Not all there yet."

She turned to Marit. "We bonded over the way he'll go on at a million miles an hour then when you can't keep up he'll look at you like you've dribbled on yourself."

"I knew you two were up to something instead of working in that school," he said, eyes narrowed.

Before they could go off on more banter, Marit asked, "So? Rose could visit with her mother and we could see some of this alien world." Now that it had been proposed, she was very interested in visiting an alien planet. Blue sky and water, green grass, animals she'd never seen before and an entire intelligent species that wasn't in the least telepathic? It sounded very exciting.

"You . . . you really want to go?" he felt both hopeful and confused as he asked. It was as though no one had ever asked him his preferences . At least, no one particularly important to him. As he so often did, he easily picked up on her thoughts, and she suddenly saw the edge of his memories, a stifling family, stifling Academy, and so many of them uninterested in seeing the universe, wanting nothing more than to stay where it was 'civilised'. But worst was the very proper horror they felt at his desire to explore the universe.

The Professor shook his head in false dismay. "Obviously he's just too ashamed to have us along," he said.

With a roll of his eyes, the Doctor said, "Oh, that's genius. Not like I didn't have grandchildren of my own to do that to."

Rose looked startled at the statement and Marit was reminded all over again just how young the girl was. Especially by comparison with the frequently utterly immature man who was literally centuries older than her own hundred years. "Anyway, if you really don't want Mum to tell them all about all the times you made her worry and insulted her cooking you can just show them around town, yeah?"

"True," he said eagerly. "No time like the present, right?"

Marit let herself get chivvied onto the ship, then stood back with an amused Rose and her mildly bemused bondmate. "Just watch him, yeah?" Rose said, getting a firm grip on one of the struts in the room. At that point the Doctor began running back and forth from one panel to another, circling around and around, while her time sense, and the Professor's as well, seemed to develop a strange sense of displacement, as though time had stopped just outside the doors.

"What is that?" she asked the Doctor, sending him her impressions.

His movements had a hitch in them, as though he would have liked to pause to consider the question, but was too busy directing the TARDIS. "That, Marit, is the Vortex. What you're feeling is that there is no time in the Vortex."

"But . . ." Marit frowned. "Time is passing right here, where we are."

"Inside the TARDIS, yeah," Rose explained. "But in here we're protected from the . . . whatever out there."

"I can just hear my Academy teachers' fits now," the Doctor said reminiscently.

Rose shot him a dark look. "This from the man who described a paradox as 'wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey?"

"They weren't too fond of me either," he admitted with some cheer. "Bunch of old sticks," he explained.

Then there was a bump and thud and the room seemed to still. A moment later there was a loud pounding on the door. "Doctor! How many times have I told you not to park in front of the telly! Corrie's on and I'll thank you to move that box of yours out of my living room!"

Dashing to the door, Rose yanked it open, even as the Doctor began muttering and pulling levers. "I told you outside," he grumped at the TARDIS. The TARDIS just sent him a wave of amused affection and a stubborn refusal to let him avoid Rose's mother.

Marit glanced at the Professor, unable to keep from laughing as she said, "I think I have to see this."

They trotted out, the Doctor following them and saying with exaggerated fear, "But she'll slap me. I think there're some intergalactic megalomaniacs that are afraid of that woman. She's a menace."

The flat they stepped out into from the TARDIS was small, but homey. That said, the colours, the patterns and decorations, they were all quite different from anything Marit had seen before. It also looked a tad . . . tacky. As they looked around, an older woman who looked a fair bit like Rose, presumably her mother, exclaimed, "There you are! You've been gone for weeks you two! C'mere," she finished and grabbed the Doctor, hugging him then practically assaulting him with her mouth.

The Professor was about to lunge forward and rescue their adopted son from this . . . attack, when they both caught the emotions creeping through the bond they had. As flummoxed as he was, this was apparently a sign of acceptance and affection on the part of Rose's mother. And as much as he was flailing about and hurling himself away, going on about Jackie controlling herself, it seemed this extremely demonstrative woman was someone he liked a great deal.

Rose, meanwhile, was laughing. "Mum, you're going to traumatise him. He won't put up with that the way Mickey did."

"He'll put up with whatever I make him put up with," replied the woman sharply. "You've been awfully quiet about what you've been doing lately," she added. "Not a word of, 'We were watching giant birds dance around giant purple mushrooms,' or, 'Last week we got thrown in prison. Again.'" She aimed a dark look at the Doctor at that one. Finally she seemed to notice Marit and the Professor. "Who's this then?" she asked.

"Jackie, they're . . . erm . . ." The Doctor trailed off and shot a desperate look at Rose.

The young woman obliged. "We ran into a bit of trouble-"

"What else is different?" snorted 'Jackie'. Marit vaguely wondered if everyone on this world had such short names.

Rose rolled her eyes. "Anyhow, it turns out that there's a . . . sort of a lost colony of the Doctor's people. He didn't know about them at all. When we got there," she continued, heavily editing, "These two sort of adopted him."

"That sounds like a thankless task," Jackie said. "You're nothing but trouble," she told the Doctor. Then she turned to Marit. "I hope you're less trouble than him."

"Mum!" Rose exclaimed. She looked horrified and embarrassed, but Marit thought she caught a hint of evaluation in the woman's eyes.

"He's a great deal of trouble when I leave him alone with my grandchildren," she said. "Honestly, you'd think he was the same age as Galen or Ana, not centuries old."

Jackie chuckled. "You'd certainly think that the way he carries on about Disney films, not to mention the way he got at Christmas."

"Christmas?" Marit asked.

"It's a holiday 'round here," Rose said. "Happens in winter and we exchange gifts and decorate with a lot of tinsel."

The Professor was immediately intrigued. "What does it celebrate?" he asked.

Rose and her mother looked at each other, vaguely uncomfortable, and the Doctor broke in then. "Depends really, on who you ask. There's a religious component to celebrate the birth of one of the primary religious figures within the culture, but the more secular treat it as a celebration of family and friendship."

"I just like putting up the decorations," Rose admitted.

Jackie smiled affectionately at her daughter. "You just like eating the raw dough for all the Christmas baking," she said.

"Anyway," the Doctor declared, "Jackie, Marit and the Professor wanted to get a look-see at Earth, so I'll be taking them on a bit of a tour. Rose, you're staying here to visit with your mum?"

"Yeah," Rose told him. "You just come by when you're all done touristing, yeah?"

"Of course," he told her, then led the way back into the TARDIS and began his manic dance again. "So, what sort of place do you want to see?" he asked. "Museums or pretty scenery? There's some lovely places in the Amazon. Right along the largest river on Earth. We could take a gander at the pyramids a few times. When they're being built and then when they're done. Ooo! Or the seven wonders of the ancient world! The Colossus of Rhodes is definitely worth a look-"

"Or we could look around this city right here," The Professor said. "Rose said you've spent a good deal of time right here and around now."

The TARDIS landed with a thump, and the Doctor said, "But I just finished setting us to go to see the Great Wall . . . of . . ." he trailed off as he opened the door and the TARDIS made a stern mental face at him. Across the street was a much-faded sign that just barely still read, 'I.M. FOREMAN" at the top. The middle was too faded and scraped to be read, and the bottom said, '76 TOTTERS LANE'.

Through the bond, his grief and nostalgia came through, as though he couldn't throttle the feelings the way he did his anger and grief over Old Galfry. "We had to give an address to the school," he said, placing a hand on the old sign. "I'd parked the TARDIS here after the chameleon circuit broke, so it was as good an address as any. I was so young then," he said. "Trying to be grumpy and old the way you do when you're young, and I underestimated the humans. Didn't think they'd see through Susan or me, but Ian and Barbara were worried about a girl living in a scrap yard with a mad old man in a box."

"What happened?" Marit asked when the TARDIS poked her. She hadn't wanted to invade his moment of nostalgia, but the TARDIS had taken control to her own ends, and Marit was curious after all.

The Doctor turned with a wry smile. "They bulled their way aboard and then I kidnapped them. Susan was very unhappy with me. She'd been enjoying her time at Coal Hill School. I don't think she ever quite forgave me that." He chuckled. "But I didn't know what to do and I didn't want to be a nine days' wonder. And ever since then I've almost always had someone with me. Mostly humans, although a few others here and there." He gave one final affectionate pat to the sign. "But this is where it all really began." He shook his head. "Despite what I may have told Tegan when I ran away from Flavia's insistence that I take the presidency."

"Kidnapped?" Marit listened to the story underneath the one he was telling, the feelings of nostalgia and loss, remembered joy and excitement that were a powerful undercurrent to everything he did.

"Kidnapped," he said. He shook his head. "I was so bloody useless. We wound up back in the Paleolithic era as they call it around here. One hundred and fifty-seven thousand Earth years back." Marit felt the Professor's surge of interest at the notion of being able to observe history in person. "I went off to collect samples and we all wound up being taken captive by a local tribe involved in some sort of internal struggle over whether and how to use fire."

The Professor frowned. "Use fire? For what?"

"As in they were so primitive," the Doctor explained, "They had only recently discovered how to create fire and were still in the process of determining its use and whether or not it was safe or wise to use it."

With some prompting, they were soon wandering the streets of London, the Doctor pointing out places he'd halted alien invasions, had arguments with former travelling companions and even a building where he once worked as a scientific advisor to some military programme when his people on Old Galfry had exiled, imprisoned and to an extent executed him for stopping some appallingly amoral experiments.

The more time he talked about his past, the more Marit began to see the complexity that underlay his often childish exterior. The more time she spent learning, the more mental notes she made to tell Torana. Interspersed through his stories of adventure were tales of Rose. Story after story, many of them not adventures, just things that happened with Rose.

As if it weren't strange enough to be under a sky of an oddly pale yet deep blue, with the water reflecting that back, with the green grass and exotic architectural styles, she saw an incredible amount of physical contact on the street. It felt shockingly exhibitionistic there. Couples draped all over each other as they walked down the street, squealing teenaged girls flinging themselves into enthusiastic hugs, young men involved in complicated hand gestures that led up to brief embraces, these humans touched constantly. And where a casual bump on the street would have been a cause for embarrassment and profuse apologies on New Galfry, on Earth it was, at best, worthy of a quick, "Sorry," before both moved on.

It put Rose's insistence that nothing the Doctor did truly meant anything into a new light. Marit was certain it meant something to him, but she got the feeling he'd missed the mixed signals he was sending the girl. Someone needed to give him a talking-to.

When Rose called, saying her mother was inviting them for tea, and the Doctor explained it was a quaint regional ritual to have tea and little sandwiches and little desserts and things at about midafternoon (along with a lengthy ramble about how much he liked little sandwiches), they agreed and rejoined Rose and her mother and the small flat.

"So, where'd you go?" Rose asked curiously. "You overthrow any alien dictators without me?"

Jackie made a disgusted noise, but didn't say anything more. Marit found herself retreating to a clinical mentality as she saw Rose's mother touching both Rose and the Doctor almost constantly. A hand on the shoulder, a brief hug. From what she'd seen thus far, touch like that was limited to close friends and family, but it just meant that Jackie saw the Doctor as one or both.

They sniped at each other in a strange sort of amicable rivalry, her telling him to get his feet off the furniture, Marit wholeheartedly agreed with that, him claiming she was an awful hostess while he stuffed her little treats and things into his mouth, her hitting him in retaliation.

After tea, the Professor insisted on looking at a bookstore they'd seen while travelling the city and the Doctor handed them both a large wad of local legal tender. Rose asking why, if he had money, she always had to pay for the chips. They agreed to come back in a few hours and they set out to explore the alien city and its alien literature. Maybe even take in a film, a form of entertainment that had, oddly enough now that she thought of it, never caught on, on New Galfry, even though they had television and plays both.

They left the Doctor, Jackie and Rose to their own devices.


	15. Mutation

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: We're moving into the home stretch. Like everyone who uses "I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself," I had ideas about what it had the potential to mean if you wanted it to. Between this chapter and the next I'll be explaining that. Hopefully this makes sense to everyone in the same way I hoped the whole time lock explanation made sense to people. That is, some sense, at least.

* * *

><p>"Alright," said Rose's mum. "Not that I'm not happy for you," she told the Doctor, "But Rose and I've been talking, and I have a question for you."<p>

Rose frowned. Her mum had got the whole story of the past several months out of her in the end, but she hadn't seemed about to go on the warpath about it. The Doctor shot her mother an inscrutable look, but said, "What do you want to know?"

"I know that Rose wants to keep travelling with you, that's fine," she told him. "But with the amount of time she keeps being gone, but coming back here as if no time'd passed, she's going to be old before I am. What are you going to do about that?" demanded her mum.

She felt herself blanch. She hadn't even thought of that, but it was sort of true. They'd be gone for weeks and weeks and months and all, and the TARDIS had been keeping their timelines at a much slower synchronicity with back home. It hadn't even occurred to her that she'd be aging normally, but with all that extra time she'd seem to age faster than everyone else at home.

It seemed the Doctor hadn't thought of that either, because he looked startled, then back and forth between them. He opened his mouth to speak, when suddenly he leant forward, peering closely at Rose. She blinked at him, but he didn't stop, getting up from his seat and leaning closer and closer. And it wasn't the sort of closer she liked to fantasise about late at night alone, this was a very Doctory sort of weird staring.

"What is he doing?" asked her mum.

She shrugged, looking past him as he apparently was examining her pores. "I have no idea. Doctor?" He leant in even closer, then suddenly licked her cheek. "Ew!"

"What is wrong with you?" demanded her mum. He had yanked a handkerchief out of his pocket and was wiping his tongue off when she added, "Why are you licking your handkerchief?"

Rose was, sadly, used to this sort of behaviour from the Doctor and told her mum, "He's wiping his tongue off, probably 'cause of my makeup." She turned back to the Doctor. "Why did you lick me?"

"Well, I . . . er . . ." he lunged forward and did it again, on what felt like the same spot. She had to assume because he was avoiding the foundation and blush she had on.

"Doctor!"

"What?" he asked in that, why-are-you-shouting-at-me voice he used to try and make it sound like it was irrational to dislike being licked for no reason.

"Why did you just lick me?" she asked slowly and deliberately.

Her mum muttered, "It's just mad that anyone even has to ask that question."

Before the Doctor could be sidetracked, Rose asked again. "Doctor. Why did you lick me just now?"

He stilled, looking at her very seriously. "Because Rose, you're not aging. At least, not enough to notice. I haven't been paying attention, not nearly enough, because I should have noticed. I needed to see what sort of hormonal balances and chemicals are being produced and . . . Pythia, I need to do some tests."

"Pythia?" asked her mum.

"Primitive temporally based deity of the Gallifreyan religion back when we were primitive enough to believe in such things. They use it as an ejaculation in the same way you might use, 'God' or 'Jesus'."

Rose looked at her mum and they both couldn't help sniggering.

"What?" the Doctor asked. "What? Oh. Rose Tyler, you have a filthy mind."

Still giggling she let him drag her off to do his tests. Only, when they got to the infimary he found they'd already been done. "Is this a time . . . thingy?" Rose asked, now a little worried that the tests were waiting for them.

"It . . . no!" the Doctor smacked himself on the forehead. "I am thick!" he exclaimed. "When I brought you on board, after the whole mess at the Institute, I set the TARDIS to analysing you every way I could. I was worried," he finished, deflating briefly as he looked at her with that intensity that always made her think he was in love with her after all.

It was a relief that at least there was a sane, normal, not time-y sort of explanation. There were only so many of those a girl wanted to deal with. "So, what do they say?" she asked.

The prompt made the Doctor spin around and start looking through the data, frowning and muttering to himself. Sighing, she settled in to wait, snagging a copy of the latest in a series of mysteries from New Earth involving frequently wrong facts about the original Earth's twentieth century. It was both a good story and really funny when they got things wrong. Like that Britney Spears was one of Earth's greatest composers. Seems Cassandra hadn't been simply making things up, she'd been repeating supposedly valid information. Unless . . . Rose rechecked the author's name. Sybil O'Brian. That was remarkably suspicious.

Her attention was drawn away from her book by movement out of the corner of her eye. The Doctor was looking significantly more frantic and bore a rather great resemblance to a startled hedgehog after running his fingers through his hair repeatedly. He was wearing his glasses, which he only took out when things were urgent or when he wanted to make himself look particularly sexy. She didn't think it was the latter right then. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"It's not that something's wrong exactly," he said. "It's rather right, at least, from my perspective it's very right, but it's not right at all. Not natural, rather. I wish it were, but it can't be. Only it seems to be, which doesn't make any sense because there had to have been intervention, there had to be. You don't have things like this happening by pure happenstance."

"Doctor," Rose interrupted the ramble. This wasn't one of the rambles where he was spouting off all sorts of information she'd never understand, this was just . . . rambling. "What is it that's got you upset?"

He took in a deep breath, then told her, "Somehow, Rose, and I don't exactly know how, you've got a rather incredible collection of genetic mutations in you."

"Mutations!" Rose felt her heart skip a beat. That sounded bad. "What's wrong with me? Can you fix it?"

The Doctor lunged forward, grabbing her hand and clutching it in his own. "No, no, no," he told her hastily. "Not like that. Not bad. It's just that they're all so rare . . . these aren't bad mutations," he explained. "Think of it like this. In Africa there are a larger number of people with the sickle cell mutation that causes an immunity to malaria. It's a very specific mutation that makes it virtually impossible for the illness to take hold."

"Oh," Rose said in relief. "So, it's like I've got mutations that do something good?" she asked, trying to understand.

He nodded. "Exactly. But there are a lot. And by a lot, I mean that there are so many that statistically it's almost impossible. The odds against it are astronomical."

"So, it's like I shouldn't have them," she said, "Not because they're bad, but because there're so many?"

"Right-a-roony," he said. "Right-a-roony? Never saying that again." The Doctor shook his head.

That raised another question, though. "Why didn't you notice before now?" she asked.

He stood, beginning to pace and run his hands through his hair again. "I hadn't been looking. This is all a breakdown at the genetic level, you know," he told her. "I don't need to do that kind of thing to give you immunisations or to fix up sprains, strains and minor contusions. Or major ones. I just . . . I was so worried after the Institute that I set the TARDIS to scan you for everything."

"Okay," Rose said, more for something to say than because it really meant anything. "So, what-all do they do?"

The Doctor pulled the screen over in front of himself and began to look through it. "These ones give you extra resilient cells, this set gives you hardier organs, that is, they break down less than other people's," he looked up at her, "And by that I mean by a lot. I always wondered about how well you could handle hypervodka, compared to Jack, given that he's from the fifty-first century and had a lot of these mutations bred into him." He looked back at the screen. "This set causes you a heightened speed of recovery from injury and those here seem to improve the quality of cell replication."

"Improve quality of cell replication?" she parroted. "What does that mean?"

He took off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose before putting them away. "All through your life, as you age, your cells are constantly dying and replicating themselves to replace the lost ones. Every time your cells replicate they degrade just a little bit. This is where aging comes from, in effect. Each time your cells replicate they become a little less able to do the job for you. Eventually it really starts to show, then they get so bad at it that they can't maintain anymore."

Rose nodded slowly. "So, when my cells stop replicating properly at all, that's when I die?"

"Essentially, yes," he said. "But that's a long way off." He looked anxiously at her, and Rose recognised the same look that had accompanied, 'Humans wither and die'.

But based on what he was saying, "Are you saying that I'll live longer, then?"

"Yes." Nothing else. There was something that was bothering him, but he wasn't saying.

"But that's good, then. How much longer?" she asked. "Like, two hundred years or something?"

He seemed about to say something, then clearly changed his mind. "Oh, at least."

That was . . . at first she was happy, but then she thought about outliving everyone. Shareen and Keisha and her cousins. To be around so long there wouldn't be anyone left who remembered the Spice Girls the first time around, no one who remembered her favourite TV shows as a child, who knew about her and Jimmy Stone, it was a little scary suddenly. Faced with that, it was a little easier to understand the Doctor. The thought of the Doctor stiffened her spine. She'd promised him, and it made her able to do it better. "I guess forever's gonna be a little longer than we thought, yeah?"

"What?" he looked at her with wide eyes.

"Remember? I told you when we went to watch that sunset on . . . where was it?"

"Amberensis IV," he said. He looked . . . strange. His voice sounded strange. She couldn't see what he was thinking at all.

So, she just looked him in the eye, very seriously, took that hand that had been in hers so much since that evening at Henrik's and said, "Forever, yeah?"

"Yeah," he breathed.

They stood there a moment like that. Then Rose reluctantly stepped away. "I think I'd better tell Mum, though," she said. "I mean, I think it'd help a lot if she knew that I could be gone and still come back to see her. That we won't . . . that I won't lose too much time with her and her with me."

"Right," the Doctor said distantly. "You should definitely do that. I . . . there are a few things I need to look at. It's just too chancy this happened by pure evolutionary chance." He was already half gone mentally, and Rose knew there'd be no talking to him outside of a crisis until he'd worked out what he needed to.

"Okay," she warned him. "But you're gonna have to explain this to Mum anyhow, because I don't know enough about genetic whatsit to explain it right."

"Oh no," he said, whinging. "Really? Your mum?"

Rose just fixed him with a Look.

He sighed. "All right."

Daring, Rose leaned forward and kissed his cheek quickly before darting back out the door. Hopefully her mum would see this as good news.


	16. I Create Myself

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.

Author's Notes: Annnnnnnd . . . done. Yeah. Abrupt, and if people have requests for something to be added to this 'verse one way or another, let me know. However, this was a chapter that was all of a piece, one piece, and that's how it ends. I will say this, there will not be "The Continued Adventures" of this Rose and Ten, because they're here for fixity and shmoopy purposes. Schmaltz. Romantic dribble. I'll let you all get on with reading and passing judgment.

* * *

><p><em>Doctor?<em>

He was vaguely aware of the voice in his head, but it had been so long before their crash landing on New Galfry that he'd been without those voices that he absently dismissed it as those telepathic hallucinations he'd been prone to, like a person in an isolation room hallucinating company, or an amputee with phantom limb pains.

_Theta, you stop that and listen to me this minute, young man!_

Marit's sharp voice snapped him out of his brown study and into awareness. _Sorry. I suppose I'm just not used to expecting contact still._

A gentle mental embrace down the parental bond made his eyes flutter closed and lean into it. The feeling was still so unique in his experience that he couldn't help but savour it. It eased back and then Marit said, _We'll be there soon, and then we're going to talk about whatever has you so overset._

He tried to tinker with the TARDIS, but he couldn't focus enough to do it. Puttering around and around until he found himself back at Rose's test results, he just played around with them, parsing them for what every single one of those mutations meant. He collected the data, spreading it out on a desk in the library. Looking as deeply as he could into what was there, he still couldn't see any markers of genetic manipulation, of some sort of breeding project or even an _in vitro_ manipulation. Nothing.

Marit's voice startled him out of his contemplation. "All right, what is it?" she asked.

"I just found out that Rose's lifespan might actually be equal to my own," he explained.

The Professor put down a stack of books he'd collected, apparently from a used bookstore, and said, "I'd had the impression that humans had a shorter lifespan. Something in the range of eighty years?"

He nodded. "Between seventy and one hundred, on average," the Doctor said. "Somehow Rose has managed to collect every single mutation that is reasonably naturally occurring within the human genome that would lead to her having a life of a thousand years, longer with medical techniques I could use to add years on."

"But that's wonderful," Marit said. "You don't need to be concerned at all about entering a bond with her, only for her to definitely die sooner than you would." The Professor smothered a chuckle as her eyes went wide and the Doctor heard very clearly, _Oops._

Her bondmate shook his head in amusement. "Sometimes I wonder how you managed as a professional psychological analyst, Marit."

"A bond," the Doctor said, tightly. Oh, before he'd found New Galfry Rose's lifespan alone would have been enough. To know that she wouldn't wither and die and could stay with him, that would have been more than enough. But he'd seen Marit and the Professor. He'd seen Rivan and Mavon and Verce and his bondmate. He'd seen the way their timelines braided together and felt the family bonds that had been made with him by Marit's family.

"What are you thinking?" she asked him.

"A bond," he repeated. "Except that Rose isn't telepathic. Humans aren't a telepathic species and . . . it would have been enough before, but now that I know it's possible to have . . ." He started pacing and running his hands through his hair.

Suddenly he was grabbed and found himself sat down very firmly on the couch in front of the fireplace, Marit fussing with his hair, her hands petting him and fingertips lightly brushing over his temples and soothing away his upset. As had become so usual when she did that sort of thing, what felt like an instinctive reinforcement of bonding that would have dated back to prehistoric days and social grooming of primitive ancestry . . . he wished he'd been able to offer this to Susan, to his own children. "All right," she said, "Now that you've calmed down a little, first of all, I think you need to decide if you want to be with Rose, period. Is that what you want?"

_Are you alien?_

_Is that all right?_

_Yeah._

He'd dealt with companions who took far longer to accept that.

_There's me._

Because every time he took her hand it was like it fit and made him feel like he wasn't alone.

_Finding her way to the wardrobe without having to ask for directions a second time and coming back with that red skirt and black cloak and looking fantastic._

_This is me. Dinner lady._

Because she was gorgeous. Even in a dinner lady uniform with a silly hat. She could probably have pulled off Time Lord silly hats.

_Rose and Sarah Jane laughing like lunatics, probably at him. He covers up the warm and squidgy feeling it gives him by grouching that they ought to be working. Which they ought._

"Rassilon, I'm completely irrational," he muttered.

_You're in love,_ Marit told him, sounding a little severe. "It's not entirely rational and isn't the point either."

"Fine," he snapped. "I do. I want to have to put up with Jackie demanding that we have a human wedding in a church where she shows off to the rest of her family, be obligated to show up for all those Christmases and weddings and holidays and birthdays that Rose lets me skip out on now and take her everywhere. "

"Then that solves that," she told him tartly. "Just because you feel you can't bond with her is no reason not to have the relationship. It's clear feelings run deep on both sides, and deciding something else will make you miserable to no good purpose." He was about to say something when she added, "And just because you're in thehabit of finding excuses to avoid getting close to people doesn't mean you should exercise those skills on Rose."

With a sharp mental poke of emphasis, she sat back looking at him expectantly. Was she right? Had he become so used to hunting for reasons not to get involved with Rose that he was grasping at straws out of habit?

_Yes,_ Marit said.

The Professor sighed. _Marit, dear, you'll have to let him choose this on his own._

The Doctor ignored the byplay as he really thought about it. Imagined how he would have reacted to the news of Rose's longevity before he'd known of bonding and this lost experimental colony. He would have been overjoyed, he knew. Probably would have rushed her off to a Las Vegas wedding (Las Vegas remained _the_ place to go for a quickie wedding all the way up through the end of the various Bountiful Human Empires, both the city and the planet) before letting her talk him into taking her home to tell her mum and have a wedding for her family and friends on Earth.

While he was thinking, Marit's hands had begun whispering through his hair and over the telepathic contact points at his temples, which while distracting, was also doing an excellent job of keeping him from working himself into a lather of panic. "You're right," he admitted. "I don't want to do . . . anything without her. And I can't . . . I'd been so lost after the Time War, and she just . . . accepted me, even after I got her home a year late."

Marit wasn't quite able to bury the sharp, _Her mother's a saint for putting up with you_, as with a final flourish, she carded his hair one last time and pulled back enough to look him in the eye. "I think you've missed something, frankly," she told him. "Rose easily communicates with the TARDIS, and I've even heard particularly strong thoughts from her once or twice. It might not be of the same strength as what you'd have with a Galfrian, but I think her mind is actually capable of handling a bond."

"What?" he asked her. Suddenly his mind ticked over all the times Rose had been saying lately that she'd heard from the TARDIS. The TARDIS herself impressed on him the way that she and Rose chatted (inasmuch as the TARDIS chatted) behind his back.

"See?" Marit said. "And as for the matter of her lifespan, why look a gift hat in the hatband?"

"What is it about Gallifreyans and hats?" he asked no one in particular. Then he answered her. "Because the number of mutations is simply ridiculous. There is simply no way that this could have happened without intervention, and in my experience that sort of intervention needs investigation."

The TARDIS spoke up then. He got the sense that she was rolling her metaphorical eyes like a teenaged girl. She prodded his memory centres, making the replay visible to all three of them, Marit, the Professor and the Doctor.

_I looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS looked into me._

He remembered this. He remembered this with near-painful clarity. Why did he have to relive this?

_I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space._

The scene shifted. Minutes later.

_I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be._

The TARDIS let him go with an almost expectant feeling.

He glared at her ceiling. "Yes, thank you for the reminder that she effectively killed herself for me."

The Professor shot him a look. "I don't think that's what she's getting at."

_I want you safe, My Doctor._

He could see it all again. The woman he loved turned to a genocidal killer, then the whimper in her voice as she burned from the inside.

The TARDIS was remarkably unsympathetic. She seemed irritated with him, actually.

_I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself._

_I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be._

"Stop. It," he grated out.

"I really think-" the Professor started, but the TARDIS impatiently repeated herself.

_I create myself._

"What is your point?" he demanded of her. He knew it was irrational of him and that she had difficulty communicating on this level in this sort of detail, but that had been a terrible day, the sick fear he'd felt at Rose reappearing, the intensification of that fear when he saw she'd absorbed the whole of the time vortex.

"You're not very good at interpreting literature, are you?" asked the Professor wryly. "You enjoy reading and books and all, but you're not very good at meanings beneath the words."

He blinked at the man. "I don't follow."

The Professor sighed. "I could be wrong of course, but in that memory Rose said she could see everything, ever, and that she created herself. What if she meant that a little more literally than whatever this Bad Wolf character is?"

"A little more than . . ." the Doctor trailed off as he thought about the implications. Really considered them. Rose had had the power to turn Jack into a fixed point in time and she'd had the ability to wipe the entire army of Daleks from existence. He thought about the ability to, perhaps, nudge at her own genetic structure. Not to cause mutations as such, but to play a longer genetic game to get Rose and her ancestry into the position to give her those mutations naturally.

_Finally._ His TARDIS was sounding rather snippy. She aimed a wave of thanks at the Professor and a final sticking her tongue out feeling at him.

He would have sent the feeling back at her as he so often had over the centuries, but he was utterly horrified over the fact that he hadn't checked her over after the whole incident was over. He'd never have forgiven himself if something had been wrong with her.

"Stop that," Marit said. "It was probably careless of you not to check, but Rose is fine, and more than that, she clearly wanted to be with you if her changing her entire genetic makeup is any indication."

"Who changed her genetic makeup?" asked Rose. She and her mother had entered the library quietly and Jackie was looking worried as she almost crept into the room. "Doctor?" she fixed him with a look that made him wonder how much she'd heard.

Cornered was not a feeling he liked, but Marit and the Professor both pinned him with stern looks, the likes of which he hadn't endured since the last time he and Romana talked. It worked. "You did, Rose."

"What? When?" Rose asked, confused.

"If you'll excuse us," he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her past her mother and his bondparents. He vaguely heard Marit and the Professor saying something to Jackie about him and Rose, but he was a great deal more interested in getting Rose away from everyone else so he could talk to her without the peanut gallery watching.

Then they were at his bedroom door and he pulled Rose in. "Sorry," he told her. "I wanted some privacy for this conversation."

She was looking around his bedroom curiously. "Is this your room?" she asked.

"Yes." He wondered what she was thinking as she trailed her fingers over the quilt on the bed.

"It's a little . . . bare," she said slowly. "Doesn't look like I imagined it would."

"I don't spend much time here," he said. "Not much point when all I do here is sleep. More interesting things to do. Rose, I . . . I never explained what happened on the Game Station."

Her attention snapped up to focus on him. "No. You just said something about singing a song and the Daleks running away."

"I . . . that is . . ." he didn't know how to tell her this.

"Hey," she stepped forward, taking his hand and squeezing it a moment, suffusing him with all that comforting warm Roseness. "Just start at the beginning and when you come to the end, stop."

"That's not the quote, you know," he started. Rose shot him a Look that made him swallow the lecture on Lewis Carroll and wordplay. "Right. What's the last thing you recall before waking up in the TARDIS?"

She frowned a moment, thinking. "Mum had got the panel ripped off the TARDIS with the lorry she borrowed, and I was going to look into the bit you had Margaret the Slitheen look into."

"The heart of the TARDIS," he reminded her.

Rose nodded. "I was just about to look, and that's it until I'm waking up on the floor."

"Right," he said, and then took a deep breath to steady himself. "You did look into the heart of the TARDIS," he explained slowly. "You looked at all of time and space, and when you stepped out of the TARDIS you were probably the closest thing anyone would ever see to a goddess, Rose."

"I what?" Rose asked, looking stunned. "I just wanted to get back to help you, that was all."

"You clearly wanted considerably more than that," he said, "If the way you stepped out of the TARDIS and destroyed all the Daleks with a wave of your hand means anything."

"_I_ destroyed the Daleks?" Rose looked a little pale at the information.

The Doctor looked at her soberly. "You did, Rose. You stepped out of the TARDIS and declared yourself to be the Bad Wolf. That you took the words and scattered them in time and space as a message to lead yourself back to me."

"That was what did it," she told him earnestly. "I saw it written on the ground, and I remembered. You said those words had been following us everywhere. That was when I figured out it was a message, telling me I could get back to you." Her hand grasped his again, fingers lacing with his as she added, "I just wanted to keep you safe."

She had been so beautiful standing there surrounded by the golden glow of the heart of the TARDIS. He told her, "That's what you said when I told you that you were going to burn. No one's meant to hold all that, everything that is and was and could be, but you were, and you were going to die." His voice cracked on the last word.

"And you think I shouldn't do anything I can to keep you safe?" Rose demanded. "Don't you get that it's not worth it if something happened to you that I could stop?"

"Because I'm not worth that," he snapped back. "Because I can regenerate and you can't." He wasn't even aware of the fact that he'd planned to work up to this a little more carefully. "That's why I took the vortex out of you even though it would make me regenerate. Because it wouldn't kill me, but it was killing you!"

Rose suddenly wrenched her hand free. She was horrified, he felt it in the moment before he lost contact with her. He couldn't prevent himself from an instinctive grasp at her hand again. She was backed against the opposite wall, her arms wrapped defensively around herself. "You said, before you regenerated, that it happens when Time Lords are dying. You were dying, and it was because you were saving my life."

"But that's it, Rose," he said, desperate to make her understand, "I wasn't going to die, just regenerate."

"I'm not worth that," she told him.

"Yes, you are," he said. "I don't know if you remember what I said when we were in the cabinet with Harriet Jones, Rose, but I said then it was an impossible choice for me. I told you. I could save the world, but lose you."

"And I told you to do it," she said. "Because I'm not worth the world."

"You are to me," he said. He might have been a little too aggressive as he said it, because she flinched back. He shook himself. "This isn't why I asked, Rose. I needed to explain something. Remember how I told you about the mutations that will prolong your life?" He didn't wait for her to acknowledge him. "I think, that is, the TARDIS told me, that those mutations are due to you interfering with your own past while you were in possession of the power of the vortex."

"How do you mean?" she asked.

Motion helped him think. It always did, and he began pacing. "You were able to see all of time and space, Rose. From the beginning of the universe to its end. And you were able to destroy the Daleks with the wave of a hand. It must have been child's play to ensure that your genes would give you a lifespan similar to my own."

"Doctor?" Rose's voice sounded odd as she asked, "How much longer, exactly, do you think I could live?"

It drew his full attention back to her. "Oh, a thousand is well within reasonable expectations," he told her in a reasonable facsimile of his usual attitude.

"So, that's about the same as you?" she asked, sounding tentative.

Something in her expression made his answer simple. "Yes."

That was when Rose's face seemed to crumple. A wave of panic overtook him. She looked like she was about to cry. Why was she about to cry? What had he said that would make her cry? How could he keep her from crying? "So, " she clearly essayed a smile. "I guess I'll be with you longer than we thought."

He became aware that he'd been leaking the whole conversation to his very interested bondparents when Marit hissed at him, _Jackie says to tell you that you love her,_ there was a pause, then came the absolute confirmation the message was from Jackie Tyler. _You plum._

_Go away._

"Doctor?" Rose asked.

"Apparently I wasn't careful enough at shielding and Marit has been informing your mother about every word of this conversation," he told her wryly.

"Oh no," she said in dismay.

"But they said something . . ." what was life without a little risk? "Rose, the reason I never said this was because you're human, because I was terrified of giving away such a large part of myself only to lose you so soon. Then we found New Galfry and I met Marit and the Professor and I saw what they had and I want that so much."

Rose flinched away. "And I'm just human," she said. "Super long life human, but-"

"No!" He interrupted, hating to hear her talk about herself like that and needing her to understand. "Marit said she was sure you had enough telepathic ability to form a proper bond, and . . . even without it, Rose, I can't . . . I don't want . . ." there was a reason telepaths tended to think saying that you loved someone was gauche, trite even. How could saying a simple word ever compare to sharing how you truly felt with the person you loved? He wasn't even sure that there was a way to say, 'I love you,' in any of the verbal languages created by telepaths that he knew.

Desperately he laced his fingers through hers and treated her to the way he would have expressed those feelings had she been Gallifreyan, the way he had with Susan, had begun with Galen and Ana, had felt from Marit and the Professor. Only it wasn't familial, what he felt for her.

Her eyes fluttered closed, her mouth dropping just a little open, looking really quite eminently kissable. When her eyes reopened she smiled, even though there were tears gathering. "I love you too," she told him.

So he kissed her. It was the obvious next step. As they did he felt her presence in his mind intensify. It must have been a result of the physical intimacy, he realised. The increased physical intimacy amplified the telepathic. Compared to how he'd wanted to snuggle into Marit's mind all those times she'd cuddled him telepathically, this was so much stronger. And he gave in to what he wanted for once, his mind feeling all snuggly warm and Rose-ish.

Rose suddenly giggled and pulled away. "You're purring!" she exclaimed. "Like a big cat!"

"Rose," he groaned. This was embarrassing. Purring like a child.

He could feel the way she'd taught herself to broadcast herself into his mind and struggled very hard not to lose all sense of dignity. "Does it mean the same thing as when a cat purrs?" she asked. Her warm and snuggly feelings increased in strength, partly due to her desire to hear him purr more.

He sighed in resignation. He couldn't even deny her this. Even at the cost of all his dignity. "More or less, I suppose. It's rather childish, though."

Rose ignored him and began kissing him again. He lost any train of thought on suppressing the motion of his bypass, instead losing himself in the scent and touch and _feel_ that was Rose. She was wriggling against him, all human physical expression, encouraging him with hands and mouth, forging physical bonds, touches that were for him alone, even as he invited her into his thoughts, the places that would be for her only.

It was instinctive, a set of instincts he'd exercised but once with Galen and Ana, though far more intense. He reached into the heart of what was Rose, stroking and winding them together, showing her how to do it in return and feeling her human pleasure at squeezing his bum through his trousers, getting to touch him in all the ways she'd wanted to but couldn't while they were just 'best mates'.

She pulled sharply away suddenly, prompting him to whine a little, but the sense of shock he got from her a moment later made him pull back, frown at her, then go wide-eyed in realisation. "What is that?" Rose asked. "In my head. You're . . . it's like . . . what's going on, Doctor?"

He'd lost himself in that kiss so deeply, he'd bonded to her without even realising.

"Bonded!" she exclaimed. At his startled look, she said, "Yeah, I heard that. What do you mean bonded?"

"It's . . . you know how when I tell people to close a door if there's anything they don't want me to see when I'm looking into their minds?" he asked her.

She looked pensive and he could feel her now, in the back of his mind, alike and yet completely separate from the familial bonds he had with everyone back on New Galfry. "Yeah?" she prompted.

"Well, it's a little like . . . like you've left the door to your mind open a crack for me all the time. I'm right down the hall, and I can hear the music you're playing in your room and see a bit of the carpet and a sliver of the walls and posters and things." He wanted to touch her again, lace their fingers together in that way that was all them, but he resisted. "You should be able to see a bit of me as well," he added. Fair was fair.

Rose's concentration turned inward, and he saw and felt the moment she found the connection in her own head. "Oh!" she said.

When he felt her probing deeper, clearly curious, he let her a moment. Then she went a bit further. "Oi, bit rude, that," he said, gently easing her out of his more private thoughts.

"You really feel that way about me?" she asked.

Now that they were connected on a deeper level than his previous surface skims of her thoughts, he could feel the doubts that roiled under the surface, that told her she wasn't as smart and accomplished as Sarah Jane, wasn't as beautiful as Madame du Pompadour, wasn't as worldly as Jack or as capable of seeing the world the way he did as a Gallifreyan might. "I really do."

She flung herself at him, physically and mentally, and he was suddenly awash in an awkward and enthusiastic wave of affection, respect, joy, attraction, lust and want. He went ahead and returned all that to her, only easing apart when she began to struggle from lack of air. "Forever?" she asked.

His grin was so wide his face felt vaguely contorted. "Forever," he assured her.

"Well, then I'd best call your gran and the rest of the family. We can't have a wedding anywhere but at All Saints. Oh, and Sally, you remember Sally? She said her daughter got her dress at a new store, where was it? I'll ask her. You'll not be wearing some alien thing at your wedding," Jackie's voice interrupted as she breezed into the room, followed by a very amused Marit and Professor.

The Professor's smile was particularly bright. "This is such an interesting opportunity to see the bonding traditions of another culture." He turned to Jackie. "I don't suppose there's room for my children or grandchildren to be involved?" he asked.

Jackie was maundering on about wedding traditions and the Professor was egging her on. Marit and the TARDIS were both unbearably smug and he felt like he ought to be feeling that old alarm at the notion that he was going to be expected to ferry family and friends around to regular family events, be constantly going back to a single planet over and over and over in the same place and time for potentially the rest of his life.

But he didn't feel that. He didn't feel it because of the squidgy warm feelings engendered by his adoptive bondparents, niece and nephew, and most of all, Rose.

He didn't quite know where and when they were going, but he wasn't alone anymore, and that was just brilliant.


End file.
